sleepydave's recent activity

  1. Comment on One more reason to hate cockroaches in ~science

  2. Comment on The value of artistic legacy in ~talk

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    This is just a difference in opinion, but I was raised to respect the dead since all that remains of them in this world are the memories and legacy they left with us, and that's something to be...

    This is just a difference in opinion, but I was raised to respect the dead since all that remains of them in this world are the memories and legacy they left with us, and that's something to be valued highly and preserved where possible.

    A quote from Milne himself if you're wondering whether he would have cared about what he was remembered for:

    "I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next."

    2 votes

  3. Comment on The value of artistic legacy in ~talk

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    Thanks for your thoughtful reply, lots to think about :) I'm well aware that much of what I wrote about is just down to my own bias/subjective beliefs, but it's easy to say that in a dismissive...

    Thanks for your thoughtful reply, lots to think about :) I'm well aware that much of what I wrote about is just down to my own bias/subjective beliefs, but it's easy to say that in a dismissive way and not place enough importance on it despite the fact that's how people typically function. When something with the title "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" is released to the world we immediately associate it with the original work involuntarily, there's no concious process for us to switch off that mental association. If the filmmakers had gone the way of The Orville and made no mention of the inspirational work in their branding and kept it identifiably separate that would be a different case, but here the issue rises from directly taking the life's work of someone else and (subjectively speaking) bastardizing it in a way the original creator would never have stood for, using the exact branding, story and characters as the original.

    I mentioned some potential parallels about trademark law in my other reply in this thread if you care to read it for context, but I would equate a situation like this to a company creating a search engine platform called Google 2: Electric Boogaloo that only served links to and images of violent/gore content and Google somehow having no legal grounds to preserve their brand image or enforce their trademark.

    The comparison to the Eragon/Artemis Fowl/Percy Jackson movie adaptations doesn't make a lot of sense to me honestly, they may well have been crappy adaptations (subjectively speaking!) but they were well-intentioned attempts at something faithful to the spirit of the original writing - they just missed the mark and that's perfectly forgiveable. Here we have a case where the filmmakers are deliberately violating the spirit of the original work by turning it into violent shock content - something that anyone with common sense can recognise is polar opposite to the values expressed in Milne's work and more so intended to shock & offend than tell a story. To reference my Mickey Mouse speculation in my post, I can fairly confidently say that many of those porn-y/gory Mickey parodies we'll be seeing in the not-too-distant future will be both posted and popularised by many people wanting to get their digs at Disney (corporation, not person) by violating their family-friendly brand image.

    That being said I do always try my best to separate art from artist and let people enjoy art despite my own opinions, I just wanted to post my little philosophical experience here and get a grasp on some other perspectives :) I'm not a conservative at all but I found it really fascinating that I was feeling more understanding about certain conservative/'pearl-clutching'-type thoughts as a result of this.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC | Official teaser in ~games

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    I think the people who've played CP2077 have already formed their opinions in a love-it-or-hate-it manner and CDPR is well aware of that, this DLC is probably more intended to get the game back...

    I think the people who've played CP2077 have already formed their opinions in a love-it-or-hate-it manner and CDPR is well aware of that, this DLC is probably more intended to get the game back into the limelight and draw in new players that were turned off by the game's disappointing reviews on release. Only the most ardent fans would really find it worthwhile to do another playthrough entirely just for DLC unless it adds a significant amount of content to the game.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on The value of artistic legacy in ~talk

    sleepydave
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    This is the one of the issues I was questioning though - when I first saw the title "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" I (probably like many others) assumed it was an officially-licensed work...

    This is the one of the issues I was questioning though - when I first saw the title "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" I (probably like many others) assumed it was an officially-licensed work since it bore the official Winnie the Pooh title (which was most likely why I was sorely disappointed by what I saw in the trailer haha). Even if the filmmakers aren't claiming this to be Milne's work it can still damage the original creator's work just by association.

    When brands are offered protections like trademarks to mitigate negative brand connotations coming from third parties or inauthentic goods, why aren't creators offered similar protections to preserve the integrity of their work - especially when they're no longer with us and therefore unable to defend it for themselves? Even for living creators the rules are muddled at best, I remember reading when Trump was on the campaign trail that his team was issued a C&D from Katy Perry's management because they were playing her music at political rallies and she didn't want herself or her music to hold any affiliation with Trump, but beyond that there wasn't anything they could really legally enforce.

    1 vote

  6. The value of artistic legacy

    ~talk Text 791 words
    My initial reaction to cloud_loud's post about the upcoming Winnie the Pooh slasher movie was viscerally negative - my gut feeling is that my life would be objectively better without a movie like...

    My initial reaction to cloud_loud's post about the upcoming Winnie the Pooh slasher movie was viscerally negative - my gut feeling is that my life would be objectively better without a movie like this in the world tainting a treasured childhood memory for millions of people.

    Then I thought back to my reaction to the Wednesday Addams trailer and it became immediately clear to me that it was just a 'me problem' - I had no sentimental ties to the Addams Family as a kid, but Winnie the Pooh was one of my mum's bedtime story staples. I trust Tim Burton based on his track record to bring a high-quality rendition of Wednesday to the screen, but these nameless & faceless filmmakers were suddenly antagonists in my mind for turning an innocent story about a talking teddy bear into a trashy slasher. But apples & oranges comparison aside, just like how there will be people against the idea of Burton's vision of the Addams family or Tom Hanks' portrayal of Mr. Rogers, there most likely will be people who enjoy this movie when it releases - it just won't be my cup of tea.

    I then started thinking about the implications of franchises reaching public domain like in this scenario - for better or worse, creators can now build upon, remix or bastardize the world and characters of Winnie the Pooh. I recently had a conversation here on Tildes about the necessity of copyright, patent and intellectual property law where @archevel raised the question of whether a person/entity should be able to 'own' an idea, and on the surface the immediate answer is a resounding "no". But thinking deeper about it (especially in this context) pushed me down a different path, calling someone's creation simply an 'idea' is very reductionist. To me, an idea is 'a honey-obsessed talking teddy bear' - there's no characterisation to that, no soul, no story, no sense of being. An idea is a I-V-VI-IV chord progression (and thus holds no legal protections), but shouldn't the artistic integrity of Journey's Don't Stop Believing be protected even after the creators are gone? Why are we so indifferent towards parodies like this when it could just as easily be something more offensive like this that can harm the legacy of the creator just by association? I've always been a proponent of free speech/freedom of expression but thinking about it from this perspective is fascinating to me.

    That's not inherently an issue of something becoming public domain though, it's an issue of preserving the creator's legacy. Copyright doesn't just protect the creator's means to compensation, it protects their right to control their creations - the right to control their artistic integrity and the legacy they leave behind. Knowing that Milne and Shepard created Pooh to entertain children in a wholesome way, I think it's fairly safe to say they would not be happy with a slasher adaptation if they were still alive. If these filmmakers were using Pooh's likeness to parody Xi Jinping and push a communist agenda, would we care more about preserving Milne's legacy then?

    All that brought me to the question of decency - whose moral compass should we guide ourselves by? Where is the line between socially-acceptable satire and obscenity? Western culture has been extremely cagey about some of the most natural things like nudity and sexuality, but here in Australia our government has no issue plastering billboards, bus stops and cigarette cartons with images of nicotine-stained teeth, abscessed mouths and diseased organs in an attempt to warn people of the dangers of smoking & excess sugar consumption - all in the name of public health. Everybody has genitals, why is our government happy to tell us that seeing boobs on a billboard could be potentially shocking for children to see when kids are exposed to NSFL images just by walking past the cigarette shelf in a store or a discarded carton in the street? When our cultural morality is so cagey about something as innocuous as a natural human body, why are we so unconcerned when someone perverts the life's work of a creator just because it's turned public domain? Should the creator have the right to protect their work from beyond the grave?

    I'm willing to bet when Mickey Mouse turns public domain in 2024 the internet will be flooded with Beeple-style grotesqueries (NSFW) and everyone will get sick of profane parodies very quickly.

    Just wanted to post a frame-by-frame analysis of the philosophical rabbit hole I went down today and hopefully stir up a conversation - I know these are fairly deep questions that none of us can really answer definitively but I still love to hear different people's thoughts and perspectives regardless :)

    10 votes

  7. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    I love this, thank you for sharing! I'm not an accordion player but it sounds great and I'm sure the Pianobook community would love to see your work if you're feeling generous enough to share your...

    I love this, thank you for sharing! I'm not an accordion player but it sounds great and I'm sure the Pianobook community would love to see your work if you're feeling generous enough to share your sample library - just keep in mind they are true instrumental/sound nerds so they would be just as willing to dish out constructive criticism as they are willing to praise high-quality libraries haha :)

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Are things swell? in ~misc

    sleepydave
    Link
    The world's swellest daily run-down of the current state of affairs. Discovered this little internet gem today, the man has been consistently uploading since 2018 and still has less than 300...

    The world's swellest daily run-down of the current state of affairs.

    Discovered this little internet gem today, the man has been consistently uploading since 2018 and still has less than 300 subscribers. Praise be.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Plex breach exposes usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords in ~tech

    sleepydave
    Link

    Streaming media platform Plex sent out an email to its customers earlier today notifying them of a security breach that may have compromised account information, including usernames, email addresses and passwords. Although there is no sign that the encrypted passwords were exposed, Plex nevertheless is advising all users to change their passwords immediately.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on China says Hollywood needs to show respect as films blocked in ~movies

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    Sure, but the difference between the situations you propose is in what they represent - the confederate flag has strong connotations with racism and bigotry while the Taiwanese flag (in today's...

    Sure, but the difference between the situations you propose is in what they represent - the confederate flag has strong connotations with racism and bigotry while the Taiwanese flag (in today's political climate) represents a nation state fighting for their independence from an oppressive regime.

    I agree a film about the Chinese military definitely wouldn't be welcomed with open arms in the US by any means either given the way things have gone with China over the past 10 or so years, but it probably wouldn't be banned from public viewing. The difference there is that Chinese people aren't being given the chance to form their own opinions on a piece of media, their government decides what the public opinion is by intervention, censorship and propagating a fear of anything that could be construed as dissent.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on China says Hollywood needs to show respect as films blocked in ~movies

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    I'd be willing to hedge my bets with you on that one, I think it's an eventuality but as long major Chinese players like Tencent Pictures exist in the western market they will not let things go...

    I'd be willing to hedge my bets with you on that one, I think it's an eventuality but as long major Chinese players like Tencent Pictures exist in the western market they will not let things go quite that easily. It seems they were happy to rescind their investment in Top Gun as soon as they realised it wouldn't make it past Chinese censors but they have much more at stake - at the point Tencent exits from western media it would effectively mean China's given up on its efforts to disseminate the "Chinese values" into western culture.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on China says Hollywood needs to show respect as films blocked in ~movies

    sleepydave
    Link
    Archive link Alternative title: "CCP didn't like US military movie". No shit hey? Correction: “We will import from whichever countries that make better films and films that are more suitable for...

    Archive link

    Alternative title: "CCP didn't like US military movie". No shit hey?

    “We will import from whichever countries that make better films and films that are more suitable for the taste of Chinese audience.”

    Correction: “We will import from whichever countries that make better films and films that are more suitable for the taste of Chinese audience the CCP.” I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese people who would have enjoyed Top Gun if given the chance.

    The appearance of a Taiwanese flag on a bomber jacket worn by Tom Cruise’s character also angered many Chinese social media users.

    There's little respect to show to a culture where this kind of chauvinistic ideology is actively promoted and sown into the culture by the ruling party.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on The more gender equality, the fewer women in STEM in ~life

    sleepydave
    (edited )
    Link
    This is a topic I've always been hesitant to talk about since my male opinion on women's career choices really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but I've always wondered why people...

    This is a topic I've always been hesitant to talk about since my male opinion on women's career choices really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but I've always wondered why people thought the gender disparity in STEM fields was because of a lack of accessibility to women?

    10-15 years ago there was a (relatively) big activist push for support programs for women in STEM and K-12 educational outreach to get more girls on board from an early age that ended up bringing many organisations like Girls Who Code into the world, but if women/girls in general aren't interested in a STEM career no number of outreach programs could really "fix" that. These organisations often have enough difficulty just getting girls interested in the first place - obviously it's a very nuanced topic, every woman is an individual etc. but sometimes the perceived problem (gender disparity in a given field) isn't really a problem so much as a difference between men and women as a whole.

    In western society women skew toward administrative & service roles just like men skew toward technical & trade roles - it's not that men don't have the means to be entering anything other than STEM or trade careers, maybe they don't want to and that's okay. Hot take: people might even be comfortable or wanting to generally stay within the bounds of their gender norms?

    The article also makes a good point about western women being in more of a position to choose a career based on their passions rather than prowesses - or it might rather be that men are typically in a position where the societal expectation is that they will be the provider, and therefore our career choices need to be more rooted in financial stability/security in order to prepare for having the typical dependent family structure in our lives. Could be some combination of the two or any number of things, but I don't think lack of access has ever been a significant barrier for women in STEM.

    Just some rambling thoughts I've had for a while, there are many fields I'd love to see more equal distribution of demographics in but I think people trend toward their gender/racial/cultural stereotypes far more often than they realise. If only one in five women are interested in pursuing STEM or other technical/trade fields then is it really anyone's place to say that's inherently bad or "not feminist enough"?

    *Minor grammar edits

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Wednesday Addams | Official teaser in ~tv

    sleepydave
    Link
    I'm actually genuinely excited to see this! I'm usually very skeptical about Netflix productions and TV/episodic stuff in general but the casting looks to be really promising. Here's hoping that...

    I'm actually genuinely excited to see this! I'm usually very skeptical about Netflix productions and TV/episodic stuff in general but the casting looks to be really promising. Here's hoping that Tim Burton takes the character down his signature dark & twisted path, and that Netflix doesn't have too much of a hand in the production that it just ends up being generic mass-market "content".

    4 votes

  17. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the heads up! Will definitely have to stick to the idle version then, can't really be making a part-time job out of anything haha. Seems like something I could have sunk hundreds of...

    Thanks for the heads up! Will definitely have to stick to the idle version then, can't really be making a part-time job out of anything haha. Seems like something I could have sunk hundreds of hours into during my school years though for sure.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    If RS itself is anything like Melvor in terms of the skilling/levelling and item system it definitely makes me want to try the original game, but like you said in your linked thread I just don't...

    If RS itself is anything like Melvor in terms of the skilling/levelling and item system it definitely makes me want to try the original game, but like you said in your linked thread I just don't have time to be getting into an MMORPG. Maybe something to consider if I retire :P

    2 votes

  19. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sleepydave
    Link Parent
    I've been playing since mid-May, but I also haven't been running multiple game saves so I'm probably not playing optimally lol. Have you played Runescape before or did you just stumble onto it...

    I've been playing since mid-May, but I also haven't been running multiple game saves so I'm probably not playing optimally lol. Have you played Runescape before or did you just stumble onto it like me?

    2 votes

  20. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sleepydave
    Link
    Since I haven't had too much time for gaming sessions as of late I've really gotten into Melvor Idle, it's a numbers-go-up idle game loosely set in the Runescape universe that puts a fun RPG spin...

    Since I haven't had too much time for gaming sessions as of late I've really gotten into Melvor Idle, it's a numbers-go-up idle game loosely set in the Runescape universe that puts a fun RPG spin on things :) Very easy to just pick up for 5 minutes either on the steam or mobile version after you get past the initial bump where you need to be active rather than idling.

    I've never played Runescape before but Melvor is the first idle game I've actually managed to find enjoyable despite not being familiar with the lore. Currently at about 33% game completion according to in-game stats but I'm expecting it to get a fair bit grindier from here on out haha

    6 votes