Tag: movies

STAR WARS and the Boomer History

This is an intriguing essay on the way in which the dreadful way Star Wars turned out was due to it being, in essence, an artistic expression of the Boomer view of history:

Every generation has a founding myth. The boomers did not earn theirs. It was handed to them, and they spent it like an inheritance, down to the last penny, on themselves.

The fathers paid for that story in blood. They came home and said very little about it. What the sons did with it is the charge. They took one war and made it the only war. They took one enemy and made him the template for every enemy. They took a vast, tragic, morally tangled contest between great powers and flattened it into a passion play with two parts available for casting: the liberator and the monster. Then they cast themselves.

That is the boomer view of history. Everything before 1945 is prologue. Everything after is a rerun. Every opponent is Hitler. Every inherited custom is a milepost on the road to the camps. Every institution older than they are is suspect, and demolishing it counts automatically as liberation. History stops being a contest of houses, orders, interests and loyalties, each with a real claim, and becomes a Sunday school pageant where virtue belongs to whoever is holding the hammer.

Notice how little thinking this permits. An aristocratic education reads history as tragedy: competing goods, statesmen choosing between evils, orders that rise and rot by their own internal logic. Thucydides. Clarendon. Burke. The boomer education forbids all of it. No tragedy, only villainy. No competing goods, only the righteous and the damned. Ask an honest question about the founding myth and you have confessed to being the monster. The range of permitted debate is narrow by design, and it is policed by people who could not survive a wider one.

The result is sterility. A civilization that can tell only one story cannot understand itself, cannot understand its rivals, and cannot explain why orders endure or collapse. It cannot discuss power at all except as evil, which is extremely convenient, because it means never having to account for its own. And while refusing to discuss power, it built an order of its own: moralizing, incurious, and sealed against challenge, because every challenger had already been assigned the villain’s costume before he opened his mouth.

If you wanted that worldview on film, you would build a galaxy of liberators and monsters with nothing permitted in between. Lucas built exactly that. Star Wars is the boomer view of history in its purest available form, which is why it is the best evidence we have against them.

It is really remarkable what a hold Star Wars had on the culture, considering that it was actually about one and one-third good movies. Even though I absolutely loved the first movie, I realized about the time they reached the Ewok planet during Jedi that I’d fundamentally lost interest in the story after the evacuation of Hoth.

I was lured in by the long-awaited making of the first prequel movie, and attended it with my best friend with whom I’d seen Star Wars at the age of seven, and our wives. I walked out of The Phantom Menace shaking my head, and haven’t seen a single Star Wars movie or television show since.

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The New Reason to Back Byron AI

The last three weeks have significantly underlined the importance of supporting the combined efforts of Castalia and Infogalactic to develop a custom AI system that will protect and enhance the ability to produce fiction without limits being imposed by the major AI providers. A number of things have happened since we launched the Byron AI crowdfunding campaign, including:

  • The continued degradation of Claude’s ability to creatively hallucinate.
  • The expanded interference with subject matter: one news site was aggressively denied the ability to use a major AI system to write about Hayden Panattiere’s death due to sensitivity concerns about its recent occurrence in the site’s article announcing Hayden Panattiere’s death.
  • Deepseek increasing its token price by 4.5x due to its upcoming IPO.
  • OpenAI actively blocking ChatGPT users from being able to intentionally imitate the style of authors both living and dead.

Even though the campaign hasn’t ended yet, the dev team has already made solid progress on a number of peripheral items, including the ability to accurately imitate various literary styles and eliminate the various AI tells, including these abominations.

The eliminations of these tells have been made with tactical precision. And that matters. Let the weight of that sit for a moment.

Despite being a major champion of the use of AI in music, video, and textual production, I still find it maddening to see how many people insist on utilizing it in an observably suboptimal manner. I noticed that Larry Johnson recently started using it to write his articles for him; it’s always easy to recognize when the article length increases by a factor of three and the author’s voice disappears into that passive wash of AI overexplanation.

In case you didn’t realize it, the most obvious sign of textual AI is when the text explains itself as well as its significance to the reader. It’s actually considered a “prestige” form of writing, and it’s very similar to what I describe as “sociopathic externalization” by novelists. This is when the writer is presenting a character’s perspective, but providing descriptive elements that would normally come from an external party. It’s not precisely the same thing, but it has the same effect of putting the reader in the Uncanny Valley.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing some video animation tests with the MiniMax H3 engine that have proven entirely successful. To better understand what that means, I’ve put up examples at Sigma Game, as well as some recently-found footage of an old Psykosonik concert featuring a much younger Vox on stage with the guys.

So check it out, and if you haven’t backed it yet but are interested in either independent book production or independent film production, get on board with Byron AI and help us set the stage for making future history.

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Smells Like Corruption

Fandom Pulse exposes Ben Shapiro’s film reviews, which may be “sponsored”:

Ben Shapiro gave Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” a score between an 8.5 and a 9 out of 10, and the reaction split down two fronts at once. Segments of the right accused him of betraying a chance to unite conservatives against the film. It is noteworthy to look at our screenshot of his review and see the “includes paid promotion” in the top left corner, telling you a lot of what you may need to know about where he gets his opinions from.

Not flying so high these days…

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The Hellmouth’s Last Gasp

Dare we hope that the failure of The Odyssey will one day mark the end of Hollywood? The Dark Herald offers hope.

The Odyssey has all the familiar hallmarks of Oscar bait, but the motivation behind it feels unusual. It doesn’t feel as though Christopher Nolan made this movie primarily to win an Oscar for Christopher Nolan. It feels as though he made it to win an Oscar for Hollywood.

This is not merely a prestige production. It is an institutional demonstration. Hollywood has assembled one of its few remaining bankable directors, an army of recognizable stars, one of the foundational works of Western literature, an enormous budget, practical locations, theatrical exclusivity, and every available marker of cultural seriousness. The finished film is being presented less as a movie than as evidence.

Look, Hollywood says. We can still do this. We can still make grand historical spectacles. We can still adapt great literature. We can still create movie stars. We can still convince adults to enter a theater. We can still make something that matters.

This is movie made to vindicate the entire Hollywood film industry. Nolan already possesses prestige. What appears to require validation is the system around him. The industry wants The Odyssey to be great because it desperately needs proof that it remains capable of greatness…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a genuinely terrible movie. There are moments when you can almost see the masterpiece struggling to emerge from beneath all of Christopher Nolan’s Nolanisms. There are moments where the practical effects are magnificent, where Ludwig Göransson’s score briefly finds supports a scene, and where Homer himself is finally permitted a rare chance to peek through the cracks in Nolan’s adaptation.

And then Christopher Nolan invariably reminds us that we are watching CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE ODYSSEY… Not Homer’s.

It’s worth noting that Fandom Pulse also has a review. Unsurprisingly, it is not particularly favorable either.

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It’s Too Late Now

Law-abiding conservatives and immigration-loving liberals alike are wringing their hands over the popular chord that CITIZEN VIGILANTE has struck with the people of the West. The point is not whether it is a good movie, or a successful movie, or not, its significance can be seen in the viscerally fearful reactions to it.

I watched the film. This is disturbing. I understand the visceral reaction to the injustice portrayed in the film, but I worry that unhinged members of our society might try to copy the main character. There has to be a better way to deal with this very real threat than resorting to vigilantiism. Let’s use our voices and our votes to change the policies that are allowing the atrocity of mass illegal migration rather than resorting to violence.
WE can do better!

No, we can’t. That’s the problem. There isn’t a better way any more, there isn’t even a different way, because the very forces that have brought the West to this juncture have relentlessly prevented the people of the West from having any voice in their own invasion and subjugation. Popular approval for this program of legal, government-assisted invasion was never, ever, sought. Every attempt to stop it through political means was thwarted in an illegitimate manner by the system. Mass immigration, political refugees, and migration have ALWAYS been very politically unpopular. No one ever voted for open borders. No one in Minneapolis ever asked to be invaded by Somalis. Every time a European country voted against its own submission to the EU, people were paid off and it was forced to vote again until it voted “the right way”.

Just because something is done legally, or by government agents, does not mean that it is right. And just because something is deemed illegal, or government agents attempt to prevent it, does not mean it is wrong. To even bring up the question of “legality” in this regard is a category error.

The question isn’t if members of every Western society are going to copy the main character sooner or later, it is how many thousands will do so, and who their targets are going to be. The ability of the “victims services” agencies to pay off the victims’ families and “prevent anti-immigrant violence” is already being tested; until recently, the mere existence of these agencies and how they provide the families with press releases and talking points was considered a conspiracy theory. And it won’t just be “the West” as it won’t surprise me if Japan takes the lead in this regard.

The estimated 250,000 girls and young women raped in the UK alone by Pakistanis and other immigrants deserve the justice that their government absolutely refuses to give them. The same is true of the victims in France, in Germany, in Ireland, and everywhere else. And given the response to this movie, it is very much in harmony with the zeitgeist and we can expect a much more significant upheaval than the singular justice provided by a single individual in the movie. Citizen Vigilante isn’t the issue here; Society Vigilante is what is most likely in a lot of our futures.

As I have repeatedly predicted for over a decade, by the time this is all over, there will be statues to St. Breivik all over Europe; he may even end up being named a literal saint by the post-inquisition church. Look up the deeds of the men to whom statues have historically been erected if you doubt me. And never forget that 100 percent of the blame for the current and future bloodshed falls on the wicked hands of the people who created all of this hatred, division, and violence by knowingly introducing the elements required to produce it. Self-defense is a God-given right for both an individual and for a nation, no matter how foreign rulers or treasonous evil rulers try to prevent it.

Can you imagine Megyn Kelly saying this on Fox News ten years ago?

“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us… GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”

Blood is not paperwork. Nationality is neither residence nor citizenship. Every nation, every people, have the immutable right to cast out the foreigners from their midst if that is their will. And every nation, every people, have a moral duty to do so when the foreigners are preying upon their women and their children.

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Baby Steps

AI video is not quite there, but it’s definitely getting closer. Here is a 2-minute video I put together out of Seedance 2.0 clips based on the script for THE GHOSTS OF BANGKOK. The audio is dreadful, there are massive inconsistencies from 5-second clip to 5-second clip, and there is more prompt censorship than I anticipated, but the results are fairly impressive nevertheless.

Working on an ATOB comic clip next.

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The Hobbit 1977

The Dark Herald explains how the 1977 Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit came to be:

There is no getting across to kids of later generations what a TV Special meant to us. You had no control over it whatsoever. None. You either watched it at the exact time the network scheduled it for or you didn’t watch it at all that year. You could possibly catch a missed episode of a regular show during reruns in the summer but not a Special. Miss it and it was gone, no place to rent it, and streaming it was decades away. When you heard that Special fanfare from the TV you dropped everything and ran!

A few guitar strings were plucked, one by one, and then John Huston’s unmistakable cadence read the first words Tolkien published about the world that would become Middle-earth. There was a respect there for what J.R.R. Tolkien began with that sentence.

The “Many ages ago” that followed was intended to draw children into myth and it worked magnificently. Tolkien nerds used to regard it as heresy because Tolkien didn’t write it but then they had no idea what horrors the future held.

Even at the time it was hardly the worst version of The Hobbit. That would be the Hobbit (1966) a 12 minute “rights retainer” featuring Princess Mika and Slaag the Dragon whom Bilbo kills at the end. There had been radio and play adaptations before 1977, mostly British naturally. The rights to Hobbit had been sold separately by Tolkien then parceled out again and again after that.

By 1977 The Hobbit’s rights were such a trainwreck that Arthur Rankin was able to snatch up the TV rights for pennies with the following opening credit “Based on the Original Version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.” The rights for that being distinct from the 1951 revision, which is what the TV special was actually based on. In the 1937 edition, Elves were called, Gnomes” (from the Greek gnosis for “knowledge.” And Bilbo won the ring from Gollum fair and square, they even parted on friendly terms. Those and some other changes were enough to make it legally distinct.

And the Rankin/Bass version was certainly distinct in its own right. It looks like something made by Studio Ghibli – Because it was made by Studio Ghibli.

Okay, fine. It was made by Topcraft although, when that studio failed the remains became Studio Ghibli, and you can absolutely see the design DNA in The Hobbit.

You can also see Tolkien’s come to that, his own Thrór’s Map was used directly in the TV show and was part of the influence of the design aesthetic. J.R.R Tolkien approved of Arthur Rackham artwork and it was clearly another strong influence. The Hobbit (1977) was a Japanese take on the Western fairytale as grotesque. You can see its influence in Nausicaä. Rankin/Bass helped keep the lights on at Topcraft until Nausicaä came out. The Japanese approach isn’t interested in cleaning the fairy tale up, it leans into the distortions. Faces stretch, bodies warp, and the line between the comic and the unsettling disappears. What reads as “off” to a Western eye is often deliberate: characters are designed to move, to emote, to perform, even if that means abandoning symmetry or beauty. It turned what was supposed to be a children’s story into something just a little grimdark – perfect for its Generation X audience.

It was an art design for Tolkien when no one agreed what that looked like and there weren’t any brand managers ruining it. There was also some leftover hippy influence clinging to it, like your older sister’s boyfriend’s van that still smelled “funny.” College age-Boomers had first experienced Tolkien – differently.

It’s such a pity that after doing a very good job of bringing THE LORD OF THE RINGS to life, Peter Jackson wasn’t able to avoid screwing up THE HOBBIT even though he had a perfectly good template from which to work on the basis of the 1977 version.

And perhaps his biggest mistake wasn’t expanding it to three films, but not licensing the original music.

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The Hallmark of Bad Writing

Stranger Things has come to its inevitably ignominious end. But at least it left us with one epic meme.

The writing in Hollywood has never been very good, and it’s always been completely delusional. But we’re definitely reaching a new nadir, when the writers and the directors can’t even pay attention to the context of the current scene in their absolute focus on inserting their insane propaganda into their creations at the most inopportune possible moment.

It’s very much like when the director decides that the best time to go for some really gut-wrenching emotion is right in the middle of a violent combat action. For some reason, the enemy completely fails to take advantage of the fact that everyone has laid down their guns and is standing around the one member of the party who actually got hit so that they can meaningfully emote for a minute or two, before they rejoin the battle, successfully inspired by their grief and rage.

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