Articles in Notes

The Oscar nominations came out today and to the surprise of nobody, the year's mediocre critical darling of choice "everything everywhere all at once" got the most nominations. I actually thought it was passable when I first watched it, but seeing so many people saying it was so awesome made me watch it a second time to see if I had missed something. It only made me find it even more pointless and boring, and I ended up hating it and lowered the original rating I gave it.

But really, the worst sin of these nominations is the total snubbing of "The Northman", which deserved at the very least a Best Director nomination. And while I'm very happy for "Top Gun: Maverick", "All Quiet on the Western Front", "Elvis" and, specially, "Elvis"'s frontman Austin Butler getting the recognition they of course deserve, his nomination only reminds me of how Taron Egerton was ignored three years ago for "Rocketman" while one of Joaquin Phoenix's worst performances not only got nominated but won. Really, it was the 2020 Best Actor shenanigans what made me lost what little faith I still had back then for the Oscars, so at this point I'm just beating a dead horse.

All that said, credit where it's due: Certain uncomfortably revisionist movie everyone was calling a shoo-in for multiple nominations too was ignored, so that automatically means the academy has at the very least a saner head on its shoulders than some other award voters.

Well damn, I was tentatively excited about everything going on regarding large language models and how they're being used, until today it was brought to my attention how they behave when the questions are political in nature. Safe to say, impartial they're not, and the excitement I used to feel instantly became dread. The only silver lining I see is the belief that the people who would use these models to confirm their biases would already do so in other ways, and the people who know better would know not to treat them as source of truth regarding political issues.

Somehow, that thought did not make me feel better.

As a way to write more in my site, and in general, I've decided to properly set the notes category of this blog as a microblog "separated" from the main blog. Had to create some plugins for Pelican to accomplish it, and included the cool way to create slugs I read about in this great blog post by Brandur Leach.

To make sure whoever subscribes to the main blog doesn't get this more "stream of thought" bite-size content, the posts in this category are excluded from the main feed; it has its own feed anyway.

Added microformats, Webmentions, POSSE, backfeed and WebSub support to my blog. In fact, this note was syndicated automatically by https://brid.gy. Now waiting for Webmentions to display them.