Zack

I have my own time machine!

[Zack @Zedagain]

Lots of anger in the world lately. Time to share my favorite word again.

Muditā (Pāli and Sanskrit: मुदिता) means joy; especially sympathetic or vicarious joy, or the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people's well-being.[1]

The spiritual opposite of schadenfreude.

[Zack @Zedagain]

@SussexHenryVIII Everyone knew, hope was still held out.

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@kylaer_ Is this like a decade ago? Does this cost Quenneville his job?

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@KaiGuy111 @AbbyMartin Hey, dumb fuck. Shut you fucking mouth. You aren’t a man, you don’t speak for us. At best you are a third tier male, you piece of shit jellyfish.

Brand is going to be in jail soon and society will be better off.

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What the #canucks?

Did they… just win? I am sitting in me and Ed’s with Katherine in total shock. It’s been such a hard season that I had to ask them to turn the game on.

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@BlueFox94 @punishedmother You claim they are libs when you just got rage baited. Thanks for telling us you are a moron.

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@BlueFox94 @punishedmother Nonsense. No one was celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, no one cared. Kirk told us that he was totally fine with a few gun deaths a year to protect the 2nd amendment.

He got to be one of those deaths. He got what he wanted for others and must be happy!

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@davidhindsmith @HandyGingerGal I do and I agree the rules should be changed. You don’t get to charge cleaning fees while expecting me to clean.

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@HandyGingerGal @btall421 It really does.

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@abhishek_tri So you are just going to continue being a dick? You were a dick before. Don’t act like you’ve changed anything.

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@yurodivys Nonsense and abuse of long tweet form. Blocking this bot now. Recommend everyone do the same. If bots are getting mass blocked for long tweets and being annoying, the bot farms will ease off or risk losing reach.

[Zack @Zedagain]

Morons like this abusing long tweet form should be blocked.

Even hiding its blue check. Bots are not good for Twitter. Long tweet bots are worse. So much worse.

[MPC @MPCForum]

A few notes on the Elizabeth Holmes documentary.

It's ingeniously put together to get people discussing, disagreeing, and arguing about what is really going on. Nathan Fielder helps this along by being comically stone-faced throughout. After Holmes' incarceration, most of the material focuses on her pseudo-husband, Billy Evans, who is depicted as a somewhat self-involved airhead intent on controlling how Holmes is perceived. He constructs AI versions of her so she can "communicate" with her family while in prison. He also tweets things she would have agreed with and buys billboard space with a photo of her she claims to hate.

In the third act Fielder meets with Amanda Seyfried (the bug-eyed, poor man's Emma Stone), who played Holmes in a pretty atrocious TV movie. Seyfried, being a somewhat ditzy actress who trusts every instant intuition that buzzes into her head, goes all in on Evans being the evil antagonist who is mind-controlling Elizabeth Holmes, but when she finally meets him and tries to get into it with him, he bluntly dismisses her with, "You're an actress." Holmes herself expresses intense dislike for Seyfried, who in a re-enactment of an unfilmed visit at the federal prison is forced to say Holmes' insults in character. So there is more going on in this documentary than you might expect.

The movie is cannily designed to leave many questions unanswered, but I think it sets up an interesting depiction of female sociopathy and manipulation. It probably won't sway crazy female viewers looking to play the Reverse Accountability Uno card and insist that this is all a man's fault, but a brief epilogue does a final rug pull. There's also a reminder that reporters are nearly as manipulative and evasive as female psychopaths.

Well-produced with an excellent score by Ari Balouzian (who also scored the recent Primetime), the movie sags only briefly at the halfway point before it builds to the final act.  The long dramatic takes and curious resonances point to David Lynch, and Fielder's stoic responses remind me of Kubrick on set.

So what is so exciting about all this? Two Jews putting on a meta production, "the more you see the less you know"? It almost sounds ordinary when you put it like that, but this isn't the first time out for either Fielder or Lance Oppenheim, the co-director who only briefly appears on camera. Fielder has been playing with the pseudo-documentary form for awhile, and this feels like an evolution of his work on The Rehearsal. Oppenheim too has looked inside and outside the documentary format, including its illusory sense of truthfulness--when, as reality television has shown us, it's usually nothing of the sort.

Every documentarian operates under a pretense, whether it is Errol Morris or Morgan Spurlock, and like magicians they are often loathe to reveal how they do their tricks. And this gets into a question that broadens to the media as a whole, in which questions of truth become increasingly murky the stronger the claims of truthfulness become. When the New York Times insists, without evidence, that Holmes said a particular disputed sentence, and after all Holmes is a convicted fraudster, why should you believe them?

In response to this, Fielder and Oppenheim pull the curtain away from the mechanics of the documentary format, even showing (re-enactments of) the negotiations to secure the rights and access. And isn't that really the crux of why we can't trust any form of media now? Because we never get to see the actual access negotiations, not even here. And that seems to be one of the movie's major points, not just about credibility but about perceived reality.

Strongly recommended.

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@CEBKCEBKCEBK What’s the deal with these bot accounts attacking movies and actors?

The only spoiler here is you showing you are stupid.

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@nomadgeist Every woman I’ve ever dated or been with for any length of time has been better looking than me. Your failures are your failures. You and the other half men are morons, stop being asses and your life will improve.

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@akafaceUS And he looks awful. What’s your point? Did you look at grimace?

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@estherzelda0514 It really is weird.

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@TheMagaHulk So you are obviously impressed by Scott Stewart. You think he is handsome and you like his personality.

All this demonstrates is that you are into men. Women have been loud that this guy isn’t good looking. You argue he is… so now we know your preference.

So?

[Zack @Zedagain]

@nationalpost I’d love to see that number broken down by province they are emigrating from. I think it just reflects separatists giving up and moving on.

Good riddance!

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@CashCompounding @SSupporter22 @business You are both whining like Nancys over how hard Canada is. I’m doing great myself.

I think you might want to reexamine who is getting grifted.