Why She Had To Go, I Don’t Know

Today I saw odd news of a lawsuit over the movie Yesterday. The problem is that there was a trailer for the film that included a scene with Ana de Armas, but she wasn’t in the movie at all, and now a couple of viewers are suing.

First, take this with a grain of salt: although some outlets are reporting it as the studio “losing” the lawsuit, what actually happened is that the studio tried to get the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that movie trailers are themselves an art form and thus protected by freedom of speech. But the judge ruled that the trailers are just commercials, and thus subject to false-advertising laws, so the trial can begin. But that trial itself has not been decided.

This is one of those case where I don’t know who to cheer for. On the one hand, this is a classic case of America’s litigation culture. Two people rented a movie for $3.99 and are now suing for $5 million. That’s both excessive and super creepy that they think watching Ana de Armas in a supporting role is worth $5 million. But on the other hand, I am — along with many others — really sick of misleading trailers. To be fair, this wasn’t a case of a pre-planned bait-and-switch; de Armas was supposed to be in the movie, but test audiences really hated the subplot she was a part of, so the final cut axed it entirely. But the movie studios have really strained people’s trust for years, and it would be nice if something curtailed that.

It’s just unfortunate how these things so often become all-or-nothing. Yes, it would be nice if studios paid the price for false advertising, but not one studio paying the price for an incident which wasn’t the most egregious example. And it would be nice for movie watchers to get justice, but not a reward for an excessive lawsuit that looks like a disturbing celebrity fixation. The ideal would be some sort of treaty between moviegoers and studios: you start making more honest trailers, and we won’t unleash the Stan army and their lawyers on you.

Boards Of Canada

There’s been a big change in hockey broadcasting this season: virtual board ads. That is, TV broadcasters can now superimpose fake ads over the real-life ads on the boards. This gives them a chance to do many previously impossible things, like animated ads, or changing ads during play.

Fans are pretty angry. I know, it’s something new in hockey, of course they don’t like it. But in this case, they’re crying wolf with justification. It is pretty annoying. Yes, the advertisers are on their best behaviour, keeping movement to a minimum, but we’ll see how long that lasts. We’ve seen some of the distracting sideline advertising in soccer, and that can’t be far away.

Though I have a couple more complaints: first, this suffers from the same problem as the virtual ads behind home plate in baseball; no concern for insulting our intelligence with geographically-unlikely ads. Like yes, I’m sure Tim Hortons really did pay for a stadium ad at this game in San Diego.

Also, the tech is apparently expensive enough that they can only apply it to the one camera. Switch to a close up, and we have to suffer the old analog boards. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it disorienting when I see a player pasted against the Hyundai sign, but then from the other angle, he gets a face full of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Having said all this, I have to admire how well it works: 

• They stay in place very accurately, unlike the on-field ads in the CFL, which — hate to say it — look pretty amateurish, sliding and spinning  around the field.
• They rarely bleed over top of player uniforms, even white ones, unlike the on-court ads I’ve seen in basketball.
• Unlike virtual ads in baseball, they don’t suffer from looking crystal-clear, on a field that we’re viewing through 400 feet of rain. Although they sometimes look unnaturally bright, almost like they’re lit up. 

It’s also strange how technology doesn’t work out the way we expect. Soccer and the CFL have had electronic ad boards on the sidelines for years, and I assumed it was only a matter of time until someone made a version of those screens that was durable and flexible enough to be used as hockey boards. But no, virtual technology swoops in for the win. Somewhere out there is an engineer with a half-finished flexible LED panel and a broken heart.

All I Used To Want For Christmas

 If I’m reviving my blog, I guess I will also have to do another of my annual complaints about Christmas overload. I’d do my usual attempt to prove that I’m not some hateful curmudgeon who rejects all the spirit of the holiday, that it’s not me, it’s just unreasonable to for anyone to be expected to have a holiday force-fed into your brain for two months like something out of A Clockwork Orange. Wait, have I already used that analogy to describe it? Dang, I used it in 2016.

This year, I can get across the concept by telling the anecdote of how I had a wonderful stroll through the Wal-Mart Christmas department, revelling in the fun, low-pressure enjoyment of exploring all the decorations. I don’t even care that it’s mass-manufactured, commercialized cheapness; that’s part of the magic of Christmas. I walked out feeling full of Christmas spirit, but also feeling like I’d had my fill. And then I remembered that it was only mid-November. 

Anyway, that’s what I would have written, except that, I don’t really feel overwhelmed by Christmas this year. I’m not haunted by cheap plastic decorations everywhere. My brain isn’t involuntarily reciting carols every waking hour.

And it’s not hard to see why: I’m just not out in public as much. Doing more things online, and more shopping online in particular, I’m not exposed to mandatory Christmas cheer anymore. And is it just my imagination, or is it less ubiquitous now? It seems like decorations are more restrained now. Maybe all of society has turned down the intensity after Covid. Or maybe it’s another part of the Great Resignation: if a company can’t find enough under-paid workers to do the basic work of the business, then they definitely can’t spare the hours to have someone hunt down the inflatable Santa out of the storage room.

So this is a case of the modern world fulfilling its promise: More activities on the Internet allow us more freedom to create a life for ourselves that is unique to our needs and desires. Is it worth the hollowing-out of the retail sector? No, but it’s something to be thankful for the next time you’re browsing Amazon listening to your own music.

1198 Days Later

I, like a lot of people, have some misgivings about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. To be fair, I haven’t personally experienced much unpleasantness or inconvenience as a result of his changes to the service. The worst it’s done for me is bring back bad memories what happens when my fellow nerds and I start thinking we can fix everything in the world.

To be honest, I’d mostly stopped using Twitter even before the Muskopalypse. And contrary to most experiences I’d heard of, I wasn’t warn down by toxic disagreement from political enemies. Rather, I was getting stressed by people with similar politics pointing out every injustice and outrage. I can understand the motivation: people feel an obligation on social media to amplify the signal of things that are important to them. But it was stressing me out, so I started to drift away.

By the way, I haven’t seen many people bring this up, but Elon Musk is still the reigning Time Person of the Year. At the time of announcement, that title struck me as at least five years late: He used to be the only guy trying to make electric cars and private space programs a reality, but by last year, both had become cliché. And Musk himself had devolved from intriguing intellectual, to, well, a nerd who thinks he can fix everything in the world.

So I followed many people over to Mastodon, the open source alternative to Twitter. So far it’s been okay, and in terms of the basic usage, not that different. But like a lot of open source software, it does seem more complex than it has to be.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Mastodon is that it’s not one entity that stores all the posts and information about all the users. Instead, it’s a bunch of servers that operate independently, but can still interact with one another. And anyone can set up their own server (at their own expense) and set up their own rules.

(Fun fact: Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social is just a modified version of Mastodon.)

So Mastodon is a bit of a throwback to harder-to-use, do-it-yourself Internet from before social media. That throwback feeling was underlined recently when famed blogger/tweeter/author John Scalzi promoted the idea that we go back to blogs as a sort of pseudo social network. I thought that sounded appealing, and I’d thought of reviving this blog recently, so I took the plunge and dusted off my old blog. Maybe it will lead to a new age of intriguing long-form commentary, and intelligent discourse and interaction. But I notice that the new Blogger interface makes it easier to add emojis than links and that does not fill me with confidence.

Towers With The Latest Trends

There's a common joke/completely-accurate-observation that when you see that a celebrity is trending on social media for the first time in a while, it gives an instant sense of dread. This is because there are only two likely reasons for the trending: the celebrity has died, or some despicable past behaviour has come to light. So you find yourself in the weird situation of being relieved to find that the beloved star is dead.

A large part of Canada went through a variation on this process earlier this week, when — without warning — the CN Tower was trending on Twitter.

(Shame on my phone's Amero-centric autocomplete for suggesting CNN but not CN, and then not suggesting "tower" as the next word after CN. At least it didn't change "Amero-centric" to "Amero-centeric".)

Assuming the tower doesn't have some skeletons in its closet, people jumped to the “death” possibility, which would be rather alarming, as the demise of the tower would take a number of people with it. Personality, I didn't worry, as there are a lot of less-scary reasons the tower could be tending. A change in ownership, a really great practical joke on the EdgeWalk, or the return of the Tour of the Universe ride (fingers crossed.)

But here's the weird thing: as far as anyone can tell, it was nothing. There was just a random swell of people mentioning the tower on Twitter, and that got it on to the list of tending topics on a slow news day. Toronto being Toronto, this was more than enough encouragement to get them Tweeting about their city. And the Rest of the World being the Rest of the World, people said, hey, I haven't thought about Toronto in years, let's post that picture from our visit eight years ago. Then add in Drake fans finally understanding the Views album cover. That pushed it further up the trending charts, which lead to all the people tweeting about how worried they were that it was trending, and it was trending even more. And Bam!: Twitter inception.

So it wasn't really anything important, but it was a good example of the fickleness of the automated systems that bring things to our attention in the modern world.

Generation X-Wing And The Millennial Falcon

Generally, I’ve been sympathetic to millennials, arguing that generations have far more in common than different. However, some in my generation have enthusiastically jumped on the millennial-bashing bandwagon. One example was a meme I saw that tried to symbolize our generations by our Star Wars villains. Supposedly, Kylo Ren is a typical millennial, while Darth Vader is emblematic of Generation X.

Of course, it’s just listing positive and negative aspects of each character, arbitrarily assigning them to each generation as convenient, while overlooking the whole genocide thing. And misspelling “Millennial” was a bonus.

I don’t buy the idea that our Star Wars antagonists symbolize us.. For one thing, the ages don’t really line up: the original trilogy were made as the last few Gen-Xers were being born, and staring mostly Baby Boomers, while the new trilogy is mostly staring millennials, while that generation are in their twenties and thirties and a lot of the viewers are the next generation. Really, the Millennials would have been personified by Count Dooku in the prequels.

And wouldn’t Darth Vader act and talk differently if he were the personification of Generation X?

• “I find your lack of irony disturbing.”
• “The Force is totally awesome with this one.”
• “Yeah, I killed your father...not!”
• “You’re, like, underestimating the power of the Dark Side.”
• “Just for once, let me see you with my old-school eyes instead of this bogus mask. You were right about me, Luke. My bad.”

And of course, if he were really a Gen-Xer, his name would be Darth Vedder. Hahahahaha I'm so hilarious.

But more to the point, try to imagine the Gen-X Sith. I mean for those of us who lived through the worst of Generation X stereotypes, it’s pretty comical to imagine: Darth X’er, in his flannel robes, lazing on the couch in his parents’ house, using the force to grab pizza from across the room because he can’t be bothered to get up, listening to the Chemical Brothers’ remix of the Imperial March.

And that’s the biggest surprise to me about Millennial bashers from Gen-X: we lived through the vicious stereotypes of us — often the same ones now aimed at Millennials, often from the same Baby Boomers that are supplying most of the millennial-hate — all to blame us for problems that were really a product of our circumstances. That’s why I’ve been sympathetic to the Millennials, and willing to listen to them when they complain about their problems.

But some people prefer to take the anger once directed at themselves, and then push it back out at others. The problem is, that makes you no better than those who attacked you; you’re just continuing that same evil. If only someone had made a bunch of movies built around that same point.

The Basketball Diagrams

In a recent commercial, I noticed that the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet was wearing a T-shirt with an odd triangular logo that looked like one of those adaptors they used for record holes. But after a few times seeing the ad, I realized that the symbol looked like an “F” and a “V,” so I wondered if it was his personal logo.

Years ago, I made a post about athletes with their own logos, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But still — much as I identify with VanVleet as a fellow vertically-challenged person, and admire his fighting back from many challenges to become an important member of a top team — he is the second-string point guard. In contrast, the athletes I found with symbols were among the best ever at their respective sports. But I did a little digging, and was surprised to find that most of the Raptors line-up have their own logos:

It turns out that although those earlier logos were created by equipment manufacturers to associate products with the athlete, today’s players are often taking it upon themselves to create a symbol for themselves. Indeed, Fred VanVleet will sell you one of his logo shirts, so he’s essentially doing for himself what Nike et al will do for the biggest stars in the game. Also, Kyle Lowry invited logo designs, but he’s still going with clothing that just has “7” on it at least for now.

In case you’re wondering where the rest of team is on this, Danny Green doesn’t have one, but his podcast does. And coach Nick Nurse has a hat with his initials on it, though that was supposedly a gift. I’m left wondering how Marc Gasol got left out of the fun. He’s a newcomer to the team, but he was a star for Memphis for many years, so I’m left wondering if this is unique to the Raptors.

I’m sure a star studded team like the Warriors all have their own logos. Well, the famous ones, anyway; their bench probably just has “Hello my name is” stickers. So I’ll look at Eastern Conference rivals the Milwaukee Bucks. Not surprisingly, their star Giannis Antetokounmpo has one, though it’s not real creative. And better still, I found a mnemonic for spelling his name. But what about his less-famous teammates? I went looking, and I couldn’t find one for Eric Bledsoe or Brook Lopez, though Khris Middleton has one that I don’t entirely understand.

So this is a weird Raptors tradition, like Jurassic Park or Drake. Hopefully they can spin this into a new way of winning over free agents: sign with the Raptors and no matter your role with the team, you get your own logo, and as many endorsements as you have time for.