Here's the fun thing- it doesn't! If I remember correctly, the only place you can see that something's going on is if you check foreground data usage for Google Play Services
Elephant in the room -- with all the "cost of living" crisis striking across the lower, middle and even sometimes higher ranks of incomes, the MSM are starting to wake up to one stone-hard reality: house prices are f*ing bonkers.
Irony -- after praising the "feel rich" wave that has been plaguing Western countries since the dotdom bubble burst.
We know the income multipliers from the article, and the article hints at the pain of those households who are going to get caught when remortgaging (the act of having to re-negotiate your borrowing conditions after a period of time has expired, basically).
2020 from the daily mail, BBC, guardian (aka grauniad), telegraph (aka torygraph) and others:
. "House prices are rising and god that's wonderful"
. "Buy now before it's too late! Don't miss out!"
. "How to borrow sensibly over 35 years" (lol)
. "Rates are low, now is a good time to get on the housing ladder!"
. in a word, property porn, sprinkled with a generous amount of "Fear Of Missing Out".
Despicable.
Successive governments, big fans of the "free market":
. Help to buy
. Various loan garantees
. Lobbying and land hoarding from a cartel of (very large, very connected) building companies/groups.
This is a fucking mess. Prices as high as this haven't been seen in the UK since Victorian times. And we all know Victorian times were great from all perspectives, don't we?) and the only entities benefiting from them are:
. Governments (stamp duty, etc)
. Banks (longer mortgages)
. Some law firms/professions
. Estate agents.
Despicable.
The rest suffer from:
. being tied to inordinate amounts of debt for what is most people's __entire__ professional life
. tied -> less mobility
. tied -> more fear, more docility
. etc, etc.
Not to mention that with interest rates rises, those monthly payment aren't exactly coming down (Anytime soon? pivot one day?). On top of food prices. On top of energy prices. On top of tax banding. etc, etc.
And now the MSM has the galling audacity to vomit such articles. Makes you wonder:
. They are probably crying for help to the government (in "gimme gibs" mode)
. Writers may or may not be up to the hilt in a very very long mortgagy relationships with a bank
. Whether they should be confronted with the appalling content they exposed to a (unfortunately and too-often-ly) financially illiterate readership. And make them pay. Somehow.
Everyone's blood should start boiling when reading such hypocrisy coming from a publication like the Guardian (see list above).
They play both sides. You can find hand wringing articles when house prices go up by only 0.8% instead of what homeowners would like. The same day as they decry housing as unaffordable.
wasn't there a quote in the soft cover Mechwarrior RPG saying something along the lines of "whatever happened to the Universe while Einstein wasn't looking?"
I'd have to take a look at my library to verify! I love the Kearny-Fuchida backstory so, they were basically ridiculed crack heads, until decades after their death people jumped to New Earth (?) on the THS Pathfinder (?).
I don't see that quote on the cover of either 1st or 2nd edition of MechWarrior unfortunately. It does sound like something that would have been on some BT book however.
Question of taste of course!
I for one immensely enjoy the slow pace and tense rhythm of it all.
The "for its time" is 100% subjective, and some young (18-20) people I know (very well I must say: children and nephews, etc) also enjoyed it very much. Asked to watch the sequel on our next "cinema night". Also all were flabbergasted at seeing an "empowered woman character" from "literally like 50 years ago". Came as a little bit of a shock for them. :o)
And ... I would kindly argue the opposite: today's productions are a blur of action, cgi vomit, sometimes almost non-sensical kaleidoscope of seemingly unrelated scenes and topics. I believe they reflect "their time": <tongueincheek>I want it all, I want it now and delivered to my door please. I will let Alexa answer the doorbell for me</tongueincheek>.
> Also all were flabbergasted at seeing an "empowered woman character" from "literally like 50 years ago". Came as a little bit of a shock for them. :o)
The interesting thing there is that the story and dialog was written for a male character and then swapped to a woman for commercial reach reasons. They'd didn't really change the dialog when they did that change though.
Had it Ripley been originally written as a woman I'm not sure her character would have been as empowered and I'm also not sure the movie would be the masterpiece that it is.
I re-watched Star Wars for the first time in a while (I watched it surely more than 100 times as a kid, but hadn't in a long time).
Leia is a straight-up badass the entire movie. She's the only competent one in the main 3 (Obi Wan's a contender if you expand it to 4, but he dies, spoiler alert). The other two are bumbling idiots until the very end, and don't go through half as rough a time as she does.
Then we open Empire and she's perfectly cool under fire while being the #1 person in charge of commanding a fighting retreat against an overwhelming, mechanized force, and has to be dragged away to finally leave her post as the structure is collapsing around her.
The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.
> The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
A modern movie can't just have a bank robber kill another bank robber. They need the killer to say "hehehe, this way I get a larger cut of the profit!" Does that really need to be said? Why can't a movie just show it but not have the character explain his motivations outloud to an empty room? Because modern movies are made to spoonfeed disinterested dimwits with short attention spans. Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
The smart writing (and smart audiences) have all moved to TV. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Better Call Saul. These are the shows that respect their audience's intelligence.
The movie business has turned into Disneyland with guns.
> Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
I've got a few relatives I simply can't watch movies with because it's like this the whole movie. It's like they can't remember anything that happened over 2-5 minutes ago. "Who's that character?" "Where are they?" "Now who's that?" "Is that the cousin or the uncle?" "What are they doing now?" "I don't understand." OF COURSE you don't understand! You've been on Instagram the whole movie! They come out of a standard brain-off romcom and they don't really know what it was about, except that the ending was sweet and romantic and they liked it. Put something like Inception or Tenet in front of them, and they're going to just sit there totally befuddled.
Also, often times that’s the whole point of the movie that we don’t know yet who is that character! Like, can’t you accept that as an unknown and work the story from there?!
As I heard it, they wrote the script without concern for the gender of the actors, and they picked actors for the parts based on auditions. Although commercial reach reasons would also fit.
SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the day, it still fits the meme:
"Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat."
If her character was really empowered, maybe they'd listen to her?
well I personally don't give a flying flamingo about man/woman in the lead role of that film. It's just great.
What I found telling is the reaction of young people today after realising "waitaminute, this isn't 100% like twitter and tiktok tell us it was... Maybe I need to do a little bit of research and <del>listen to the old man<del> (nah!)"
That sounds like an awesome trick to write tough female chracters without having your tainted brain trick you into sterotypes. Just random all genders up after writing.
What would be a way to find out if they did? Does this leave any trace?