MechE

Frog Fractions.

As a character study of broken people, The Leftovers is pretty much peerless as a piece of television in recent years. I can't think of anyone better qualified than Lindeloff to take this on.

I don't think they did it deliberately.

I'm not trying to catch you out, just interested in what changed your mind? I really enjoyed it. It plays to Iannucci's strengths of focusing on the petty office politics rather than the national politics.

I watched the sequels last month after having not watched them since the cinema. All the rubbish bits were just as rubbish as I'd remembered, but in between all that there was quite a nuanced story which addressed head on some of the ambiguity around the politics of the first film - particularly in relation to the Red Pill movement. Also this YouTube video helped me appreciate the large amount of time not spent in the Matrix.

I've got a 'don't neg anyone' policy that I've successfully maintained for several years, but man you are testing me hard today.

Word of mouth is going to get harder. Apple are about to kill their affiliate programme which helped sites like Touch Arcade stay afloat. Classy move from a company that just announced record profits.

So did The Boat That Rocked...

The same with Aliens. I think it's about an hour before any action there, although I haven't watched it for about 15 years so I might be wrong.

They bought Campo Santo Games and they have an actual game in development that looks like it might release this side of the heat death of the universe.

I was talking about the first half. The second half was absolutely about mocking the interviewee.

And that's why they weren't mocked. They were there to provide a counterpoint to those groups who were being mocked, i.e. people who live in a filter bubble.

Firstly, I'd like to think I did a huge amount in my last place of work to improve diversity and inclusion. Amongst other things: I helped change the promotion system to not be so rigidly focused on rewarding bullish alpha behaviour, and to value softer skills. I gave talks to directors about how tokenism doesn't address the underlying issues of D&I I helped to push for more social / team building events to take place during lunchtimes rather than in the pub after work so they were more inclusive for people who had family commitments, or weren't particularly into the drinking culture. I promoted the contributions of every team member, rather than the senior guy taking a lot of the credit, as tended to happen. But beyond this, you've got to be proportionate in your response to things. Being a bit patronised by a client is not a crime, and some people take even the slightest suggestion that they've made a sexist comment as a very serious slur, so having a bit of a rant with your colleagues can be completely proportionate response.

But this didn't happen. What we end up doing here is when women have a bit of a rant about their experiences of being patronised, that gets blown up and they have to defend the accusations that they've called someone a woman hating misogynist. The end result is that women end up keeping quiet. I know when I used to lead a team with some female mechanical engineers, they would get a load more patronising comments than I ever had to deal with. Being able to have a bit of a rant about it was a useful release for them. To escalate this to a serious case of slander is counterproductive.

I'd say Chappie is more of an interesting failure (and it was definitely a failure) rather than an out and out bad film. Robocop 2014 was a whole heap of bland nothing. I can't even remember why I was disappointed by it.