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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • He’s one of the greats, I agree. Plus he has no rape/sexual assault allegations or abusive behaviour on-set over a 40+ year career, so that gives him a 900% boost in my estimation.

    He plays a lot of ‘safe’ characters. That is, characters that don’t require him to dig deep into his own capacity for human depravity or whatever, and I think this gives people the impression that he’s not in the same league as your De Niros or Pacinos. But I have never watched a film of his where he didn’t completely sell the performance to me, even if the movie itself was shite. He’s content and secure enough to not need to take roles that require him flay his psyche on-screen, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I love watching those intense performances of course, but he isn’t any less a master of his craft just because he has other focuses. It’s like guitar virtuosos such as Steve Vai, who can play just about anything with superhuman levels of skill, speed and precision, versus someone like BB King, who plays stuff that a beginner guitarist could use as great training material. No one, including Steve Vai, would say BB King is a lesser guitarist or musician because his music doesn’t require 12 fingers on each hand to play. Tom Hanks is the BB King of this tortured analogy, and someone like Gary Oldman is Steve Vai. Both great, but there’s more to it than mere ‘spectacle’.

    I would love to see him to something more dark and evil, if only once. If Robin Williams can play a serial killer, and can play it well, Tom Hanks would absolutely smash that shit. Especially now that he’s an older fella; I think he could get away with a lot more without damaging his ‘brand’. I wanna see him be a serial killing, necrophilic, EVE Online-playing demonic monster.



  • Low hanging fruit, but “The next president of the United States is Donald J. Trump”. And I heard that shit twice. The second time was definitely the dumber of the two, but the drop off from 2nd to 3rd dumbest thing is about as wide as the known universe. It’s cartoonish in its absurdity.

    But the dumbest thing I’ve heard personally from an individual is that unbaptised babies who die go straight to hell. I was told this by a woman who liked to preach Jesus’ eternal unconditional love in my town centre. I’m atheist, but by default. Like, I didn’t read my way into it or anything, I just completely lack any impulse to believe despite being made to go to Catholic mass every week for 17 years. All that’s to say that I don’t have particular animosity towards believers, but that kind of believer can suck a dirty dog dick.

    Apart from it being insanely unfair to babies - roasting away like a rotisserie chicken without even the consciousness to know what’s going on - it’s also beyond evil to tell that to believers who’ve lost children soon after birth due to disease before they even leave the hospital, or have miscarried through no fault of their own, etc. Strangely, I never hear that argument from the anti-abortion religious fanatics. That is, “don’t abort the baby, or it’ll be sent straight into Satan’s Big Green Egg!”

    Imagine being Satan, and having a daily influx of humans too young and unformed to even walk when prodded by a demon’s pitchfork. Even a supremely evil entity like he’s alleged to be would have to wonder just what the fuck is going on with heavenly bureaucracy for this to be the way things are done.



  • 58008@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldGreat influence
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    18 days ago

    The intent and impact of the word was a lot different back then, certainly so outside of the US, but still, using a subset of humanity as a stand-in for an adjective is pretty grim stuff. Shows how little was thought of them. Like if the characters had instead become white from a flour mill explosion, it’s unlikely they’d have been described as being “as white as scampering little crackers”.



  • I thought this guy was a legit scientist, but I read his recent book Quantum Supremacy and it was all shit like “with quantum computing, in the future you will be able to solve athlete’s foot”. Literally everything you can think of is going to be quantummaxxed by cubits, according to him. Need your car serviced but the garage isn’t open on Sundays? Quantum computing. Need your mother-in-law to dial down the snarky comments about your new house? QUANTUM COMPUTING. Frequently walk into a room, forget why you went in there, leave, then immediately remember why you went in the second you cross the threshold? MOTHERFUCKING QUANTUM COMPUTING!

    I’m sure he is a legit scientist, of course, but as a science communicator and terminal book-hawker, he’s no better than Joe Rogan.