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[silverspawn]

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (extended)

So I liked this a lot less than the Fellowship and a lot more than The Two Towers. In fact it ends up an 8/10, exactly in the middle.

It was just really epic. I liked the long battle of minas tirith way more than that of helms deep. Felt less like going through a checklist and more like witnessing events take place. And it's not just a few good guys killing lots of bad guys; the bad guys have super weapons as well.

And the scenes with the giant spider, Shelob, were also really great. If I didn't know what was gonna happen, I think it'd be really scary. Although -- blame for me now noticing this goes to YMS -- the scene where Frodo fights and then almost gets caught in a web would have been more powerful if they just didn't play any music. (Just look at the scene where he gets caught; they *do* play that without any music, and it makes it more effective.)

But there were also things that annoyed me, like

- the Orc tower thing (where Frodo gets captured) is abysmal. All the orcs just happen to kill each other exactly before Sam goes in, and then he also for some reason beats three orcs at once. It's so stupid. probably worst plot point of the entire trilogy. And it's completely unnecessary as well; they could have just had Sam save him from the spider. It would have improved the score, though not by a full point

- I appreciate that the good guys had a plan in the end, but man it wouldn't work if Sauron could rub two braincells together. I guess that's sort of a necessary evil, or at least difficult to fix

- did anyone else notice that they had access to an army with power=∞? If Elrond had just initiated that plan a year earlier, they could have literally gone through mordor and killed every single orc. Or if they had done it a day earlier, they could have avoided all human losses in the defense. It kinda leaves a bad feeling to have that thing in your story even if the idea is also pretty cool aesthetically

- all the fire is CG and doesn't look real. (Again, blame YMS for me noticing this.) Although this was also worse in The Two Towers; they had fire in the swamp area for some reason, I don't understand why, and it looked fake as shit.

- please be less cavalier about wasting drops of water and crumbs of Lembas, it drives me crazy

Back to positive things, I like Elrond, Eowyn, and especially Galadriel. Conversely, Arwen basically has no character. Also the way the ending wraps up with Gollum biting Frodo's finger off is pretty cool. Gollum in general is a really fantastic character. Although I did not like how he got the ring initially; he just murders his friend outright, wtf? You could say it was the ring, but I thought the ring slowly  builds up its influence. Kinda makes it seem like Smeagol was already a psycho, and I'd prefer it if he started out as a normal person. But nonetheless, Gollum is great.

Didn't make me cry anywhere (if it did, it'd probably be a 9), not even at the departure scene in the end or the part where everyone bowed for the hobbits. But I certainly felt more than in the Two Towers.

[Awaclus]

"Why does Gondor think the One Ring can help them win the war? This doesn't make any sense"

t. silver

"Why does Sam have no trouble beating orcs while possessing the One Ring? This doesn't make any sense"

also t. silver

[silverspawn]

Awaclus' ability to find plausible explanations for plotholes in LotR (2023)

So I was pretty impressed with this one, it showed me lots of things I would have never thought about initially. I'm not completely buying it, but it's better than what I thought would be possible. 9/10.

[silverspawn]

Anyways some other movies I haven't mentioned yet

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

I watched this because Spike Jonze directed it. I have to give it a 5/10 because I got bored a lot and had to pick it back up like half a dozen times, but I feel like it's more my problem and that the movie is actually quite good, it's just not my thing. Would be a great movie for kids or even adults who have more of an aesthetic for adventure stuff.

Also, there were definitely some themes explored here (I think the biggest one is the transition from thinking something is in good fun vs. something is disrespectful, and how a game or something can transition from one to the other drastically) and if I thought about this more deeply, it's possible I'd appreciate it more. Like if I saw someone smart give this a 9 and talk about how deep it is, I wouldn't be surprised. But my rating is based on how much value I derive on it, so alas it's a 5.

I've Loved You So Long (2008)

This is not a romance movie. It's rather a movie about a woman who just got out of prison moving in with her sister.

YMS praised this one highly, and... sure it's very well acted and presented and there's no movie BS and it's overall a competent movie, but I found it ultimately too basic to be impressive. Like it's just not riveting. So it's only a 6/10.

Doubt (2008)

This movie on the other hand blew past my expectations. It feels like a really quaint, small-scale story at first -- it's about a pastor who's suspected of sexually advancing on a kid -- but the way it's handled just has so much more emotion than I expected. Really incredible acting from everyone. This one's an 8.

Burning (2018)

This one's something. Don't want to say anything about the plot, but the radical "honesty" of displaying a petty realistic, not-particularly-impressive young guy stands out. It shows things you don't expect a movie to show, like him inappropriately masturbating to this girl he met. (It doesn't actually show it, the movie is entirely non-graphic, but you get that it's happening.) It feels almost uncomfortable, like you shouldn't get to spy on his private life like that.

But what is this incredibly realistic portrayal in service of? I'm less sold on the story. Was very uncertain about the rating, but ended up as a 7.

Sooner or later I'm accidentally gonna cover the same movie twice

[silverspawn]

ETH cracked the 2k mark o/

it's now... still slightly below my purchasing price for the last couple of buys. Man if I only I had purchased later. I'm overall up only because way way back I first bought ETH when it was 300$ or sth.

But still, it basically recovered, and is chugging along just fine. So the whole FTX thing didn't mean the end of crypto, nor should it

[silverspawn]

All my 10/10 movies in one place <3



I naturally acquired all these files by ripping BlueRays I legally purchased though the use of legal software

[Awaclus]

Awaclus' ability to find plausible explanations for plotholes in LotR (2023)

So I was pretty impressed with this one, it showed me lots of things I would have never thought about initially. I'm not completely buying it, but it's better than what I thought would be possible. 9/10.

I actually don't think there are any plot holes in the films if you go with the interpretation that everything in book canon is also true in film canon unless there's a contradiction, in which case only the minimum amount of book canon that can be ignored to fix the contradiction is ignored. E.g. the fact that gods literally exist does a lot of heavy lifting in making amazing coincidences working out in the good guys' favor plausible (and Tolkien probably purposefully wrote many of those coincidences to be much more amazing than what would have been necessary exactly for that reason).

[silverspawn]

I just had a meditation session interrupted by another call for a lottery thing. This is probably a metaphor for something. It's also sad.

And I don't get how this keeps happening I haven't participated in anything in months. But just nodding along and then using the Widerrufsrecht (right of withdrawal?) seems to work fine. They also all have exactly the same structure, it's very strange.

If this isn't the last time, I think I'm gonna ask about when exactly I supposedly did a thing to warrant this

[silverspawn]

I'm gonna get another free magazine for a few months. yay free paper!

[silverspawn]

I actually don't think there are any plot holes in the films if you go with the interpretation that everything in book canon is also true in film canon

that's very possible, but I haven't read the books.

(Although what about the plot hole that they could've just used the eagles to fly to Morder?)

[Awaclus]

(Although what about the plot hole that they could've just used the eagles to fly to Morder?)

There are multiple reasons why they couldn't:

1) The entire plan is to sneak into Mordor unnoticed (hence the relatively small fellowship instead of a massive army), and one does not simply fly massive birds into Mordor unnoticed. Sauron has flying beasts that are a match for the eagles on his side, plus a ton of weapons that could be used for shooting projectiles at them, and he knows the eagles exist and are friends with Gandalf and that the Ring has been discovered by the pro-Gandalf side of the conflict, so he's probably extremely prepared for that too. What he isn't prepared for is a hobbit.

2) The eagles would probably refuse. They're Gandalf's friends, not his pets, so their agency has to be respected, and they're stubborn creatures. They are willing to help Gandalf to some extent, but only on their own terms.

3) The eagles are a Big Deal™. Gandalf is afraid of the Ring corrupting him so much that he'd rather give it to a hobbit, not because he thinks he's particularly easily manipulated (and he's probably particularly resistant if anything, and so are the eagles), but because it would be a particularly great disaster if that did happen. The same applies to the eagles. (and not just because having one of them suddenly decide to drop Frodo from a great height due to the Ring's corruption would be unfortunate)

4) The eagles are being more useful in other ways, namely by gathering info. A lot of the time, when the good guys, especially Gandalf, inexplicably (as far as the film-only audience is concerned) know what the enemy is up to, it's because the eagles saw it and told Gandalf; a good example of that would be in Fellowship where Gandalf knows that the enemy has found Gollum and tortured him for info.

[Awaclus]

What he isn't prepared for is a hobbit.

To clarify, obviously he knows that a Baggins in Shire has allegedly had the Ring at one point, and later he learns that said Baggins indeed does have the Ring and is on his way to Rivendell. He doesn't know that the same Baggins still has the Ring after that, and probably expects e.g. Aragorn or Gandalf to have it instead (and we actually know that eventually Sauron was convinced Aragorn had it, because that's the premise the ploy to send a small force to seemingly taunt him into surrendering but actually to distract him from Frodo's quest was built on, and it evidently worked).

[silverspawn]

This is great:

[faust]

This is great:

Having assisted in a topology course twice, this is fairly accurate.

Though he should have included Tychonoff's theorem that the product of any number of compact sets is again compact. This is of course trivial in the case of a countable product, but the uncountable case is a fun little exercise.

[silverspawn]

Though he should have included Tychonoff's theorem that the product of any number of compact sets is again compact. This is of course trivial in the case of a countable product, but the uncountable case is a fun little exercise.

Random sidenote about this proof: the standard form (at least if the lecture and Munkres' book are to be trusted) always use the definition by which a space is compact if [every collection of sets for which every finite subset has a nonempty intersection] has a nonempty intersection. Then you have a pretty complicated proof using the axiom of choice. But there's a different proof using the regular definition of compactness that relies on the well ordering theorem, and I found that one significantly easier and didn't get why it wasn't the go-to proof. Not that I remember how it goes now.

[silverspawn]

(Also seriously are there any practical applications for topology? Do you know?)

[faust]

(Also seriously are there any practical applications for topology? Do you know?)

There are! Well I can mostly speak for knot theory, which is my area. I know of people who apply knot theory to try to learn something about how knitting patterns for fabric impact the global geometry of the resulting cloth. There are experimental chemists who tie polymers into knots in order to obtain materials with interesting properties, and they use some basic knot theory to find admissible patterns. There are more obscure applications of knotting in quantum field theory, but maybe that doesn't quite count as "practical application".

For more general topology, I know that recently the topic of persistent homology has been pretty popular, which applies homology to high dimensional sets of data in order to detect patterns, and I've even seen some research using this data analysis to study something related to Covid, though I don't recall exactly what they did.

[faust]

And seriously this molecular weaving that chemists have recently done is some sci-fi shit. They used knotted polymers to make materials that are extremely sticky normally, but that you shine some UV light on them and they become non-sticky. It that was understood better you could synthesize materials with pretty much whatever properties would be useful for your application.

[faust]

Something completely different.

So Anatomy of a scandal, which is the show I am still watching, is either about a false rape accusation or about, well, a true rape accusation. I legitimately am still not sure, though I'd take a bet at even odds.

But it made me realize that I'm not actually familiar with any real incident of a confirmed false rape accusation. Ofc I don't watch the news so...

I have just finished watching this show and had this comment in mind. I find it a bit strange; in my mind there was never any serious doubt that the rape accusation in the show was true. I'd be interested to know how far along you were when posting this, and also whether you feel that at the end of the show it was clear that the rape (or, both rapes) did happen.

[silverspawn]

Something completely different.

So Anatomy of a scandal, which is the show I am still watching, is either about a false rape accusation or about, well, a true rape accusation. I legitimately am still not sure, though I'd take a bet at even odds.

But it made me realize that I'm not actually familiar with any real incident of a confirmed false rape accusation. Ofc I don't watch the news so...

I have just finished watching this show and had this comment in mind. I find it a bit strange; in my mind there was never any serious doubt that the rape accusation in the show was true. I'd be interested to know how far along you were when posting this, and also whether you feel that at the end of the show it was clear that the rape (or, both rapes) did happen.

If I remember right, they show the first rape scene (of the now-prosecuter) at some point, and after seeing that, it was pretty obvious that the second one also happened. It's possible that I figured it out a bit earlier, but not that much earlier.

My comment was probably posted pretty early, like after the first or second episode. But I don't remember exactly.

So why was it obvious from the start?

[silverspawn]

Certified Copy (2010)

This is so strange that I have to spoil it.

So a guy gives an interview for a book; the book shares the movie's title and it's about art and specifically about how it doesn't matter whether something is original, and how meaning is projected onto the thing. Then he goes onto this trip with a woman whose name we don't learn, but it's communicated that they haven't met before. Halfway through,  some waitress confuses him with her husband, she doesn't correct him, and from there on, he just is her husband and the movie is about her lamenting how he's never there. This shift isn't acknowledged, it's just what happens.

There's probably some clever interpretation of how this all means something, but I'm not smart enough to get it. I don't even understand how the art theme and the marriage theme are connected. I should watch it again before rating it, but idk if I'm interested enough to do that.

The other thing is that so much of this movie is just the two actors having an abstract debate about art, and it's so weird, like it's just such a strange way to do a movie

I watched this because the director also did Like Someone In Love. I'd say this one is even more unorthodox, but both are exceptionally well acted and presented. Also both are mostly in real time (this one may have had zero time jumps). And LSIL is entirely in Japanese while this one is in English, French, and Italien, so like that's remarkable if nothing else.

[faust]

Something completely different.

So Anatomy of a scandal, which is the show I am still watching, is either about a false rape accusation or about, well, a true rape accusation. I legitimately am still not sure, though I'd take a bet at even odds.

But it made me realize that I'm not actually familiar with any real incident of a confirmed false rape accusation. Ofc I don't watch the news so...

I have just finished watching this show and had this comment in mind. I find it a bit strange; in my mind there was never any serious doubt that the rape accusation in the show was true. I'd be interested to know how far along you were when posting this, and also whether you feel that at the end of the show it was clear that the rape (or, both rapes) did happen.

If I remember right, they show the first rape scene (of the now-prosecuter) at some point, and after seeing that, it was pretty obvious that the second one also happened. It's possible that I figured it out a bit earlier, but not that much earlier.

My comment was probably posted pretty early, like after the first or second episode. But I don't remember exactly.

So why was it obvious from the start?

Well, it maybe wasn't completely obvious that that was where the narrative would go, but judging this as if it occured it real life it gave me immediate "this is a rapist" vibes.

Because he's a Tory.

No, but more seriously, he has exactly the priviledged background and attitude that I would expect from someone who doesn't care about consent.

And from a narrative perspective, there is never any motivation explored for why the accuser might have lied, nor any factual incorrectness or things that don't add up about her testimony, so I'm not sure the show even wants this to be ambiguous.

[silverspawn]

Agree about his background and the testimony. But, his personality didn't strike me as someone who's dishonest. (You presumably disagree.) That was an important factor for me. He seemed like someone who had integrity.

This is also a major reason why I like the show even though he's guilty. It doesn't feel like they constructed a cheap, easily hate-able villain.

[silverspawn]

I'm increasingly confident in the following take about LLMs, which is that they simply cannot do sequential reasoning. The way humans solve difficult problems is that they read the thing, build an internal representation on the thing, and then have algorithms on that representation. If it doesn't work, they can try more and/or tweak the representation.

LLMs don't do anything of the sort. They just run the algorithm directly. So I think a good way to think about GPT-4 is if Von Neumann read a text and then just said the first thing that came to his mind.

The thing about this is that a Von Neumann who is literally not allowed to reflect on the problem in any way whatsoever is still smarter than some people. (Obviously chosen him since he's arguably the highest IQ person who ever lived.) Furthermore, LLMs are also educated about everything, so they have a vastly larger knowledge base than any human.

But this theory still predicts that the approach doesn't scale because solving harder problems on the first try requires exponentially better algorithms. (I think, this claim is also not trivial.) And again, "first try" here means "first thing that pops into your head". I'm not talking about solving problems without feedback; that's a totally different and much lower bar.

[silverspawn]

I'm trying to test this theory by coming up with 10 puzzles that smart people can solve but LLMs can't. So far I have 3 and my prediction was correct for all of them.

It's actually really difficult to come up with them. They all need to have the property that they're "easy" in some sense (although they might still be such that only mb a third of adult humans can solve them in 10 minutes) but no one can solve them immediately. Maybe in 15 seconds, but not at once, not on the first try. And they also need to be sufficiently different from the typical puzzle in the training data.