Aric Clark
@aricclark.bsky.social
Communist, tabletop roleplayer, theater geek, organizer, Pastor.
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is trying very very hard - to be a fulfilling conclusion to a series that was never conceived as a unified narrative, and to be a grand cinematic experience. The effort is very evident and for me it mostly succeeds.
If you use chatgpt or another large language model to create something and pass it off as your own you should be ashamed. That is a very shameful and embarrassing thing to do.
"I remember many of those earlier nights concluded in my basement, the walls trembling with the frenetic energy of raw passion and unfettered ambition." Author @devinboss.bsky.social remembers Portland's 2020 racial protests in this powerful essay from BlackOut—available in print this Wednesday!
Ghost Town: Fronting the Revolution
[Editor's Note: The following article is part of BlackOut: A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement, a joint publication from Donovan Scribes and the Portland Mercury. Written e...
portlandmercury.com
Me walking around the house humming the same 4 bars over and over making weird little movements as I come up with choreo ideas...
Saw Verdi's Falstaff with the family last night. I'd never seen a comedic opera before. Enjoyed it immensely.
Spent the weekend at a TTRPG con in the Dalles. I ran 4 games and had a wonderful time:
A lot of people think they're "upper middle class" the same way more than half of drivers think they're better than average at driving. It's dumb misplaced competition that keeps us from facing a systemic problem.
So far, Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias have come out against this piece which means you know with 100% certainty that Ed is correct and you should listen to what he’s saying
Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · last yr.Newsletter: I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
Finally watched Coppola's Bram Stoker's Oldman's Dracula... The production design in this is beautiful and Oldman as always is compelling, but I just can't get with Coppola's apolitical melodramatic romanticization of every narrative.
BREAKING: Police just surrounded Rev. William Barber, prominent activist and pastor, as he and others prayed in the U.S. Capitol Rontunda. Police then expelled everyone (including press!) from the Rotunda to (presumably) arrest them. I've covered protests here a lot. Never seen anything like it.
Children are people. Crazy I know, but it's true. youtu.be/iy53s5b3xkA?...
Grow Up! Why does everyone hate children?
YouTube video by The Leftist Cooks
youtu.be
Moments when I can't calm my brain down and regulate my nerves/breathing were once so rare for me that I didn't know they could happen to me. I am not a fan.
When people break the law, and their actions are righteous and appropriate, we should applaud them. When people abide by or enforce the law, and their actions are repugnant, we should condemn them. We should never pretend the law is a moral dividing line.
Interesting subject of conversation tonight: what are 3 of the most important qualities you want in a friend?
If you appreciated Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, then you should read The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. If these two had been writing when I was teenager, I might have become an ethno-botanist.
Printing out readings and forms for auditions this Sunday. It's wild how anxious I can feel for other people's auditions.
Go see Sinners. Instantly one of the best vampire films of all time. And the music- OMFG.
I don't think having kids makes anyone entitled to any rights actually. Obligations? Yes. Lots of em. But rights? No. Kids are people not possessions.
On Tuesday, April 22 at 2:30pm – a resolution to support PSR comes before the Community & Public Safety Committee. Introduced by @councilorkanal.bsky.social, @councilormorillo.bsky.social, @counciloravalos.bsky.social Please show your support! Write: bit.ly/write4psr Testify: bit.ly/speak4psr
See what happens is, I start a collaborative project and then it gets to a point when I have to wait on a collaborator for some reason and I get antsy, so I start a new collaborative project... and soon I'm juggling 79 projects.
I find the common talking point that anarchists assume everyone is as nice as them strange. I'm a pessimist who has learned from numerous horrific life experiences that people can treat each other terribly and that's exactly why nobody should be given vast amounts of power over others.
Two things can be true. 1. Stoking fears about overpopulation is often a Trojan horse for eco-fascism. And 2. Humans take up too much room on this planet. There is too much human-centric biomass and land-use.
Tragedy of the Commons is a fake social theory that becomes real when cities who try to be decent get overwhelmed by cities who are shitty sending those they refuse to support locally to those cities.
