For those who are unaware, Australia is very close to mandating a government-controlled digital ID to access government services (you already need one if you have a registered business, or to collect lottery winnings, for example), and to becoming fully cashless. This is very much a part of all that.
"Won't someone think of the children" has always been the playbook of authoritarians, left and right. I can't believe how quickly people here (i.e. in Straya) have forgotten, or have willfully chosen to ignore, that fact...
I think McGuire, who wrote the original book, also wrote revisionist stories in the worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. But he specifically also intended Wicked as an Iraq War analogy...
Paraphrasing, but he said something like, "I originally wanted to write a novel about Hitler, but decided not to do that, so I thought I would write a novel about the second-most hated character in American popular culture: the Wicked Witch of the West". Which is... Interesting, to say the least.
OG book is considerably darker in tone than the musical (and with less romance), too...
Me specifically?
I ain't paying to go see this movie, bruh.
I saw Wicked when I was like, 13. With my family.
"Musical theatre" was briefly my thing, to some extent, but I am definitely not some Wicked fanatic, lol...
For me, it's not necessarily that she's black in the movie that I hate (although, spoiler alert - that, in itself, doesn't fit with the story at all), but how fucking ugly she is. Elphaba is meant to be sort of "nebbish" or geeky, initially, and then get "glammed up" by Glinda. Otherwise it makes no damn sense for Fiyero to be attracted to her at any point...
She was never supposed to be ugly as a shoe, which Erivo is, lol.
And also, if they were determined to go with a black actress, why not one who was actually born and grew up in a Western country, and so actually understood the context (if you read any of Erivo's tweets, or watch the interviews, she pretty clearly does not)..? Or, for that matter, why not choose someone younger than their late 30s..??
Nothing about that casting makes sense, and her very personality makes her a liability. Either this is an elaborate "gotcha", or she sucked a fair bit of dick to get to where she is... Or both. Both makes sense.
Edit: Why didn't they just cast the other chick featured in that article? She is literally orders of magnitude more attractive, had already played the role and is very possibly less insane than the woman they chose... I mean, come on now.
Also, apparently she won something called the WhatsOnStage Award for Best Supporting Performer in a Female Identifying Role in a Musical...
I just... This isn't even worth parodying at this point. These people are completely nuts.
I mean, the fact that this quote is taken (almost word for word) from a comment on the Youtube video it links to, and not even from anything from or related to the video itself, suggests that you may not be too far off...
Because Youtube comments (and Reddit, which this AI apparently also uses as a source) are notoriously dry, factual and unbiased, right?
Man, we really do live in the dumbest timeline, hey...
So I figured it out: someone, jokingly, commented on that video (8 years ago!!) that the lyrebird "Can't speak kookaburra properly, and so is unaware he is using racial slurs" (i.e. the nigga/nigger thing), and that single comment is what the AI is using as the source for this...
Jfc, we are doomed as a species.
It claims that this clip, from Attenborough of all things, is the source of that line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y
Which makes... Zero sense.
I watched that damn series at the time it came out. I have zero idea how anyone could come to the conclusion the AI apparently has, having watched it...
True that. Which I think worked, when she was playing Salander (as, from what I can tell, the whole "fierce, battered woman" schtick lines up with the original books), vis a vis the other two actresses who have played the role without the same "toughness".
But it doesn't work so well when almost all of her subsequent roles have been pretty much the antithesis of that, lol.
The "toughest" role I've seen her in, in the last 15 years, is almost certainly Lamb, and even then, I'm pretty sure she's a housewife, lol. And I think they only made her vaguely "independent and tough" because it's also a sort of Nordic noir...
In English-speaking roles, she's seemingly pretty much incapable of being any of what she claims to be in this article, which is... Amusing.
Then again I've rarely met a Swedish girl speaking English who sounded "tough". Grating? Sure. But rarely "tough"...
Danes, on the other hand...
Edit: Apparently she's half-Spanish. I always assumed she was second-gen immigrant Swede (there seem to be a lot with chips on their shoulders, especially women), but I assumed something more "exotic" than Spanish, lol...
True, but she's more "European arthouse" than Hollywood.
Still the film industry, of course, but the vast majority of her work has been on the other side of the Atlantic, rather than in Hollywood stuff.
This is true, at least if in the scenes I'm thinking of, lol.
Though it's been like 15 years. I would assume she has probably "matured", by now, at least physically, if not mentally/emotionally...
I didn't even recognize her in Lamb, at first!
In that role, yeh. Though I have to admit to not finding her particularly attractive generally, most of the time. She just comes across as sort of "plain", to me. Though in her "real life" she seems to look better than in most of her roles, imo.
But anyway, as Lisbeth Salander specifically, she just looked... Weird. As did Rooney Mara, to a greater or lesser extent. I don't think anyone pulled, or could pull off, that role like Rapace did...
No love for Age of Mythology, anyone?
I admit it wasn't the best, but I still enjoyed what I played of it, at the time...
In like, 2006 or something, that is, lol...
3 was fun, on single player. As allurus said, I'm not sure how well the multiplayer worked. But I didn't mind the plot/storyline of single player.
It was a bit... Odd (incongruous?), in comparison to the first two, but I still enjoyed it for what it was, personally. And the story has stuck with me more than most of AoE2, at this point, tbh...
Funny how she rails against "cuteness" here, and in pretty much every English-language interview she does, now, and yet... That is pretty much the only reason she gets cast. If she was ugly, or hell, even as weird-looking as Rooney Mara or Claire Foy in the same damn role, then we would never have heard of her, so that is... Extremely entitled, and naive at best. Very much like Keira Knightley...
Even more ironically, in English-language films, I have only ever see her play a waifish, unequivocally hetero, damsel-in-distress type character, which is exactly what she purports to hate, and/or refuse to play, lol...
"Have your cake and eat it too", and all that...
Also, Safari is webkit, not chromium, so... It's not quite as black and white as that.
But in general? Yeah, I guess...
Or Gmail, as OP mentions. Gmail (and GSuite) are ridiculously ubiquitous. Even my Uni used to have it for all students.
That'd hit them, at least a bit.
Wasn't Youtube originally a separate company, before being bought out by Google..? Similar to how Instagram existed before Facebook gobbled it up...
So it must have been profitable at some point, before then, no?
Now do Amazon and (less likely) Disney. Go on, I dare you, DOJ.
Does it work for in-video ads, though?
I thought those were unblockable now…
This is not exactly the same (Ocean, by John Butler) but it's my go-to acoustic guitar instrumental video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdYJf_ybyVo
It's an almost "spiritual" experience, for me, listening to that.
Edit: Be warned that the absolute pricks at Youtube now put ads in the middle of the video (as they do for almost anything over 5 minutes, now), which rather ruins the whole experience. But if you can find a recording of this track somewhere, I really do recommend it. Hugely.
It’s honestly pretty ok if you get out of the cities. For example, I spent a bit of time in a place called Sala, and there was almost zero evidence of this, there. Pretty much the same in Borgholm and Kalmar (though I did encounter a few immigrants).
Pretty much, if you get out of Stockholm County entirely (and arguably a few of the surrounding areas), and avoid Malmö, Lund, and much of Gothenburg, you really won’t encounter much of it at all…
Not that it makes it all that much better, given probably 70% of Sweden lives in the places on that list, but still…
Also worth mentioning that Finland has started to import this “problem”, too…
I think Scotland is somewhat tricky for them, because while yes, there was the whole Wallace/Bruce/Rob Roy period, there was also the fact that the Scottish later directly participated in, and benefitted from, colonialism, were some of the "worst" "colonial masters" to be subjected to (on an individual level), and also contributed massively to fucking over the Irish...
Similar for the Welsh, albeit they had less power in all that.
And then there's the fact that the Lowland Scots treated their Highland brethren worse than pretty much any Englishman of the period, which, again, complicates things. Which I'm pretty sure even the Simpsons joked about, lol.
So... Scotland is a tricky one for the wokies. Like Canada and NZ, lol.
But you're also not wrong about Braveheart itself, and the awkwardness of Gibson, to these types, ha.
Edit: As an aside, Scotland's "rebranding" as anti-imperial, "we were colonized first!", etc., etc., is exactly what Austria did after WW2, to distance themselves from the Nazis. Which is why, in large part, Austria has such a distinct "national identity", now, to differentiate from its "German-ness". Vis a vis for example Bavaria, which is also Catholic and non-Prussian, but which was part of the German Confederation, rather than being "Anschluss-ed". I was not aware of this until recently...
History is written by the censors, and all that...
Yeah, I've had similar experiences with younger classmates at Uni, and this was before AI overview was a thing...
It's been a year and a bit. From what I gathered talking to a Scottish student earlier this year (also female, so there's a pattern, arguably) it's only gotten worse since that time...
On that note, my Uni no longer discourages either generative AI or Wikipedia as a source, when it comes to essay-writing...
Which is... Deeply concerning, IMO.
I hate to think what it is like in corporate-land, these days...
It's like (going off on a tangent here) the "reviewers" who are busily claiming that Cynthia Erivo is "perfect" for Wicked despite being probably the ugliest woman ever in a musical lead role, and the fact that she has continuously insulted everyone from White British men, to entire British cities, to even their precious protected group of autistic black women (despite being Black herself)...
It's amusing to watch the whole thing implode. They literally couldn't have found a more ugly person, inside and out, and yet almost every review is glowing, lol...
Though that's not AI. That's just what passes for "journalism", these days...
The movie does also feature a disabled black woman (not sure if she's gay), in a role that has previously universally been played by an able-bodied white girl, so no wonder they love it so much, lol...
We (in Australia) already had something along those lines, during Covid, with "check in" apps. Especially in South Australia, where those on lockdown were actively monitored, and required to answer random calls from the state gestapo if their location tracking was ever turned off...
Covid was a dry run for all of this...