At a visceral level I hate Art Deco. I'm all for elegance in architecture, but something about it feels so self-aggrandizing, isolating, and hollow. On the other hand, I think Brutalism, when not overdone, is great. A medium sized Brutalist building with a little bit of moss on the outside and an abundance of plants inside, chef's kiss.

I've been on an interesting train of thought these past few days. I came across some criticism of a random old movie and I started thinking that the reason why I actually hate most modern movies is because they are all cowardly avoiding having any possible political interpretation for anything that happens in them. I've experienced movies that when the big fight scene starts, I'm falling asleep because I'm just so negatively invested in the characters or what will happen to them. That made me think about why so many boring, bland movies and shows keep being made, and it made me think of an opinion that the biggest reason why studios keep betting on blockbusters that are as boring as possible is that they are dependent on theatrical box office takings because streaming killed post-release revenue streams such as movie purchases.

I think that the reason for this is at least partially a symptom of the death of desire for physical media itself. Why deal with the inconvenience of physical media when you can just press a button and the movie starts playing? But at the same time I don't think this is entirely the fault of streaming services, but the fault of movie companies attempting to exert too much control over how people access their films.

I won't bore you with explanations of the limitations of streaming services. We've all been there, surely. They don't have what we want, the stuff we do want to see is spread out on a hundred different subscriptions, yada yada yada. So why do we not deal with them piecemeal? That answer comes with good news and bad news. Good news: you can! You can both buy and rent most movies that have ever been made. Bad news: it's an absolutely terrible deal if you do.

Right now there's at least three major services that allow you to buy digital movies: YouTube, Apple TV / iTunes Movies, and Prime Video. There's also the vestiges of the industry's "digital movies" initiative called Fandango at Home, previously Vudu - the one where you'd use a code you got with a DVD that said it included a digital copy. The problem with all of these services is obvious: if you buy a movie from them, you don't actually own it. They can and will take away access from you at any time for any reason they see fit.

There's an obvious solution to this: rental. It doesn't matter if they de-list a rental because you never had the illusion of ownership to begin with. But that has it's own problem: it's way too fucking expensive.

To put things into perspective, Blockbuster, before it closed down, would let you rent new releases for between $3-5 for a 1-2 day rental, while older movies could be between $1-3. Granted, this was before a lot of inflation, but those rentals also had the costs of running a store in expensive commercial real estate as well as the people who had to manage it, the cost of purchasing the media - sometimes at retail prices - and the cost of maintaining them (rewinding cassettes, cleaning and resurfacing discs, and replacing worn media).

Lets compare the cost of renting on Prime Video today.

Dicks the Musical is a somewhat niche movie unavailable to watch on streaming sites that came out more than two years ago, and the current price to rent it is $4.99. Five bucks. I should mention this is for a movie that I already watched on Hoopla via my library card for free.

Batman Returns is a blockbuster from 1992 and is available for $3.99. Four bucks. You get a one dollar discount if you want to watch something 30 years old. Fantastic.

The category that will really open your eyes is new movies. Zootopia 2 just became available for digital purchase, with no physical editions, and is not yet available on Disney+. If you want to purchase the film, it costs $29.99. Rental is $24.99. Frankly I cannot imagine a world in which the number of people who would pay for that rental exceeds the number of people who opted to pirate but would have paid if the price was at least half that.

If you forget that the major studios own their own streaming services, then this math really doesn't work out. Surely they are getting more money per stream through purchase and rental than they are with the fractional payment they would get from licensing it.

But of course you have to remember that they do own their own streaming services - it's part of why everyone's complaining after all. The major producers, by discouraging short term rentals and pushing streaming services (note that Prime Video will try to sell you one of those subscriptions if the title is available on one), they are attempting to move from producers of cultural products to yet another industry of rent seekers.

It's been a while since I've watched an old TV show. We've had widescreen TVs in our houses for decades now. When HD and digital video came into the scene, it basically came hand in hand with the 16:9 aspect ratio. It was more cinematic. It was basically a mark of quality in and of itself.

On a whim, I decided to watch Wolf's Rain, an original Bones anime that was produced in 4:3. I thought it would be difficult to adapt to the more narrow screen. I was thinking what I'd be missing out on by the missing part of the screen.

In hindsight, those thoughts were pretty rediculous. The people who made the show knew they were going to target that aspect ratio, so they built the entire show around it. It's animation: every frame is literally a painting. The aspect ratio was never a limitation to the artist because it was effectively the same limitation any given piece of paper or canvas they would apply their art to.

By no longer producing video in 4:3, we have lost something important to framing: verticality and angularity. 16:9 means there's a lot more room to the left and right than there is up and down, and because you have so much more horizontal view dutch angles tend to be extra disorienting. While Wolf's Rain doesn't use dutch angles very often, vertical framing is extremely common. One early episode has a particularly striking scene where a white wolf is running vertically up a cliff towards the moon. Other times it's used to show off the scale of large structures, which can better express a sense of dread or oppression. The show also often has circular framing; where characters and objects are arranged in a circle, which doesn't seem to work quite as well aesthetically on widescreen formats.

Now that I've started thinking about this, I started to think about what a shame it is that we are actually losing some of our treasured 4:3 shows from the past. TV shows aren't terribly well archived in general outside of ultra-popular shows, and even then many old shows that were made for 4:3 have been bowdlerized into 16:9. Many shows have been stretched out or had their tops and bottoms deleted in order to fit into 16:9. Some shows were shot on film and had new scans done in order to use the parts that were originally designed to be cropped out. But because they are ruining the intent of the cinematographers, the addition is not necessarily a good one.

But what do you think? I know this is probably not a popular opinion, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks this.

The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about style and formatting over the years. I'm curious to hear what you all care about. I am also curious to see if I can be persuaded to cool down some of my own hot takes based on your responses. I'll share a few to get us started.

1. For the love of all that is holy, do not put a footnote in a title or in an abstract.
2. Similarly, do not put a citation in a title or an abstract!
3. An abstract should be... an abstract, not your life story or even a summary of the paper. It most certainly should not develop and defend arguments.
4. Does a published manuscript really need to be double spaced?
5. I'm in the punctuation-inside-quotations camp, but I am open to the alternative. I am somewhat of a weirdo in believing that individual authors should be free to use either style (so long as they remain consistent in their usage).
6. Bibliographies should prioritize the language of the original source; meaning, it is ridiculous to transliterate the titles of non-Latin works in a bibliography. What are you going to do with that information? If you don't know that language, then it is utterly meaningless, and even more so because you can't even do anything with that transliterated text. Plus, good luck getting a standard transliteration out of anyone. All this does is just obscure the fact that these sources were cited, at least as far as indexers are concerned. It would make more sense to just include translated titles next to the original, but eliminating the non-Latin text altogether is so absurd (looking at you APA).
7. On a similar note, foreign words should not be italicized or emphasized any other way just because they appear in a text. All this does is fill up the text with needless emphasis that distracts from the things you do mean to emphasize.

Okay, I will stop here before I cross the threshold where I won't be able to get anymore work done today! :b

So, where do you draw the limits on what constitutes as a sandwich?

I am kind of fond of this alignment chart as a starting point.

I think I fall somewhere around True Neutral-ish. While I think everything in the structural purist row constitutes as a sandwich, I do not consider Choctacos, burritos or poptarts sandwiches.

Speaking of poptarts, potential spin-off debate: Is a poptart a ravioli?