Pretty sure he just passed the torch off to someone else (without selling it) because he was tired of it, then continued development shortly aftwards as "ublock origin". uBlock itself (not origin) got sold off the Adblocker Plus and allows some ads.
Eh, I've seen worse films from him, and worse acclaimed films this past couple years. In fact, 2 of the 6 movies I've watched the past couple years have been with Nicholas Cage, and I'm not even a fan of his.
I don't know if it's just me but cinema has become really shit, unless you're into superhero movies. It's like nothing matters any more to executives and moviegoers of all ages than superheroes. Are we living in Idiocracy?
No, we’re living in a world where piracy and exploded budgets mean every movie needs to be a hit. One flop and the studio is gone. So the studios produce movies that are certain to be not flops, like the endless sequels, and that will draw people to cinemas where there is no piracy, which means impressive spectacles with explosions.
I'm sorry but piracy is not to blame for a 100 million movie budget. I live in a small country and we're able to produce very enjoyable films for far less than 10 million.
Pig is a great example because it essentially could have been a student project. The only thing you really needed was one good main actor, and who's to say a student of art couldn't have done a good job just as well. The location shots, the various scenes are all ultra low budget.
Or I could rip my legally purchased* CDs and give the finger to the leeches and rent seekers that fuck us almost as hard as they do the artists. Yes I support corporate genocide.
While I'm inclined to agree with your point and I do think that some languages really are just more difficult, I think it should be pointed out that something like 54% of adults in the USA read below a sixth grade level. Many of them (about half) are functionally illiterate.
Thankfully, while your first assertion is (sadly) accurate, your 2nd is not. From the wikipedia article you cited:
> "Literacy in the United States was determined by the National Center for Education Statistics to be at a mid to high level in 2019, at 79%, with 21% of American adults categorized as having "low level English literacy," including 4.1% classified as "functionally illiterate" and an additional 4% that could not participate.[1] According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level."
The second claim comes from something I heard mentioned the other day in relation to a New Yorker article about parents finding out during covid lockdowns that their elementary school kids couldn't read hardly at all. I guess they've changed the teaching styles so kids don't really learn like most millenials did.
FWIW, here's what I was found on Google:
> According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 21 percent of adults in the United States (about 43 million) fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category.
This is one of the big tragedies of Ramanujan. We have all these miraculous mathematics from him but we don't really know how he got there. A lot of this stuff we already knew, but he seems to have found it all out independently. No idea how though, all because he was too poor to buy paper. Jeez.
Maybe thats what made him what he was - working in an ephemeral medium forcing his working memory to adapt in ways that are conducive to doing mathematics?
For a comparison on the other end our spatial memory structures in the brain have changed since widespread use of gps/mapping apps, apparently.
I'm trying to think of where I've seen this in TV and movies. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (IIRC) and there was a TV show where some Asian man had a plasma gun embedded in his wrist or something. Aliens were involved, and their cell phones all had roll up screens.
I have no experience as a user, but I've heard about it in the past and have been following the keffals story. From my understanding it was a site largely dedicated too, or encouraging, or at a minimum allowing people to dox trans people and harass them by contacting employers/friends/family etc with pedophilia accusations. Keffals has been lobbying Cloudflare to drop hosting/DDOS protection for them after being forced to move to a new country, and due to them having a large online following for support they're having way more success than a lot of other people that they've harmed in the past
Web forum spun up to harass an intellectually disabled man into ruin (for those following along at home, objective: achieved), and then proceeded to attempt to ruin the lives of other people as well.
Short version: Website that tracks the salacious details of internet celebrities' lives appears to have crossed a celebrity who is very interested in having that information erased from the public.
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Long version:
Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to discussing the affairs of famous people. Often, this goes as far as public records searches and weird internet sleuthing to find addresses and other such information that is usually considered private. The odd thing about kiwifarms is that it is organized so that individuals have a single thread, which is essentially a record of all the past information and rumors on that person in one convenient place.
There are disputed reports about Kiwifarms being instrumental in the harassment of 3 individuals to the point of them committing suicide, and people on kiwifarms have taken pictures outside of people's houses, etc. Lots of creepy behavior. Threats of violence have also appeared on the site, but are against its ToS and the owner of kiwifarms claims that they get moderated pretty quickly - whether they do is up for debate. It's mostly a center for sharing creepy levels of information and bitching about famous people, particularly when those people do weird things. Critics of kiwifarms believe that they are a center of information gathering (and thus coordination) for harassers.
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One notable individual, who uses the online handle "Keffals," did not like the content of their KF thread. Keffals is a transformation who has engaged in some behavior that is at best borderline, including sending hormones to kids without their parents knowing and running a discord server ("the catboy ranch") that involved prurient contact with minors. Keffals has also done several embarrassing things online, such as producing pornography and participating in internet drama.
Keffals was served with a search warrant recently, presumably regarding the former activities. At least one armed officer came to their house, but no guns were drawn, and Keffals' devices were seized. After the search warrant was served, Keffals erroneously claimed that someone from Kiwifarms had swatted them (and later walked back the claim), and then said that they were being threatened to the point of running from Canada (weirdly to countries with no extradition treaty), and started a campaign to get the site taken down. A gofundme was put up, also.
In response, people on Kiwifarms stepped up the creepiness, finding the hotel that Keffals was staying at in Ireland based on one picture of the bedsheets, ordering pizzas to the hotel, taking pictures outside the hotel, etc. Keffals later went to some other location, and I believe is not posting pictures any more.
During this time, several bomb threats and threats of violence against Keffals and the people who support Keffals also appeared on their kiwifarms thread. Also, people from kiwifarms tried to get the gofundme taken down.
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IMO the whole situation looks really bad for everyone involved. Two groups of internet trolls went to war. One side had a lot of institutional/media backing.
kf was the most accessible and moderated forum for gossip of internet personalities (mostly negative in the same way traditional gossip magazines are typically negative)
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors
