Sergio

New film by Mel Gibson, huh?

On January 16, 2025, it was announced by president-elect Donald Trump that Gibson would serve in a new role as one of three "special ambassadors" to Hollywood, sharing the role with fellow actors Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. Trump stated that he wants these actors to make Hollywood "stronger than ever before" by bringing back business lost to "foreign countries".[212] Trump said that the three would be his "eyes and ears" and he would act on their suggestions...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Gibson

I think it made Traditional Martial Arts dojos modulate their claims. It provided a venue of "live" instead of scripted adversaries in a variety of styles, which made it difficult for unscrupulous TMA dojos to make claims about how powerful their arts are. (i.e. you can just say "why don't you go use it in MMA?") Of course there's still value in TMAs: exercise, discipline, competitions, skills like punching and falling and kicking, etc. And MMA has its limitations too, it's just another rule-based competition, see Rory Miller's "Meditations on Violence" for one discussion on this.

Today's entry and the last several days leading up to it remind me of some of the Notorious BIG's "storytelling" songs like Niggas Bleed or Somebody's Got To Die in which he and his friends plan to go kill someone and then they go kill them. The focus of the story is the process, not the target.

Untitled Mina Harker film: By March 2020, Karyn Kusama was hired to direct a film centered around Dracula, from a script co-written by Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay. The project was to be a joint-venture production, with Blumhouse Productions serving as the production studio.[203][204] The film has been described to be a "faithful adaptation" of Bram Stoker's Dracula, including a plot told from multiple perspectives.[205] The film was intended to take place in modern-day Los Angeles with the working title Mina Harker. Jasmine Cephas Jones was cast to play Mina Harker while Dracula would have used the alias of Vladimir, but in April 2022, three weeks prior to its principal photography start date, the project was cancelled by the associated studios due to creative differences with Kusama. At the time that it was shelved, Miramax had been intended to be one of the associated production studios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Monsters#Cancelled_and_repurposed_projects

I was never a huge George Michael fan, but I remember reading how one recording session everybody left except for one engineer, so George had him show how to use the equipment so George could make a song from start to finish by himself. That song ended up being "Everything She Wants", and he used the same approach for "Last Christmas". After that he didn't need to be in Wham, he was pretty much his own artist. I really respect that, it's the same kind of thing that Prince and Trent Reznor did.

MMA's had a great impact on traditional martial arts. It made people think about what to do if you come across a grappler, and specifically a ground-fighting specialist. Previously, among the major TMAs only judo really thought about it. The dishonest dojos will say something like: I just won't let them get that close. Which is BS. The more honest dojos will say something like: that's not really our focus, but we sometimes have a visitor do a seminar on that.

Ya didn't miss much just a lot about the Anglo-Americans running around and preparing for a confrontation. We're coming up to the end, just read today's entry and follow from there.

I just wanna point out that these 3 ladies had done nothing wrong. They menaced him when they found him trespassing on their land, and they menaced the lawyer guy when he broke into their room, but that's it.

Everett True - !truecomics@midwest.social

• bimonthly sumo tourney starting next week! as before I plan to make like 3 more posts on !sumo@lemmy.world during the 15-day tourney and encourage others to make their own posts https://lemmy.world/post/38274096
• zagorath's Dracula Readthrough is coming to a close on !vampires@lemmy.zip ! this was a really fun event, it'll be kinda sad to see it go.

And the little red mouse knob got painful to use after a while.

my index fingers still ache from several years of playing Freeciv using that knob.

It's special bc Reddit had a lot of close-knit communities that felt like they were more than just another social network. Facebook was always just some company building things, but Reddit seemed like it really was about the people. Spez looked at that and said he'd rather just have a lot of money. I mean... has he even done anything interesting with his money?

btw I don't mean to bring you down, but billionaires always have hangers-on who honestly think the billionaire is some kind of genius and who genuinely want to be just like them, even apart from catching what few scraps they might get off the table.