the jingle that starts and ends every eurovision show is my favorite song

NCUTI GATWA AND EMMA MACKEY Barbie (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig

Stuff like this reminds me that not only are Elephants immensely intelligent and deeply social, they also generally consider humans to be legitimately “cute/adorable” in the same way we do for dogs or cats.

This playful elephant is likely acting accordingly.

Elephant scientist testing whether humans understand object permanence.

Celebrities need to use their celebrity status to be harmlessly weird more often. Enya lives in a castle and talks to nobody. Lady Gaga wore a dress made of actual raw meat one time. Whatever the fuck Robert Pattinson has going on

Yes we should be worried! What happened to Japanese Americans in World War II. What happened to Afghan Americans or anyone even remotely middle eastern looking after 9-11. The Russians have nothing to do with what Putin is doing. In fact they are being jailed and shot for protesting the invasion.

You cannot blame the people for what their government does. I mean you saw Trump right?

When the Palestinians try to stand their ground, western media calls them terrorists

Deutsche Bahn launched a website with information for refugees from Ukraine in Ukrainian, Russian, Englisch and German.

btw I've seen a few people say this so friendly reminder that the country is not "the Ukraine" but simply "Ukraine," with no article. That is the official name of the country and has been since its independence from the Soviet Union. Using "the" suggests that it's not its own sovreign nation and simply a region, and has been explicitly stated as grammatically incorrect by the Ukranian embassy. Not to mention the way it disrespects Ukranian independence by referring to them in the same manner as they were under Soviet rule, when they've asked to say otherwise.

Along a similar line, it is Kyiv (Ukranian transliteration), not Kiev (Russian) and Donbas and Odesa, not Donbass nor Odessa, for that same reason. These are small details, but they do mean a lot to Ukranians when you are speaking about their independence. Дякую!

i love subtitles

I need to read to hear

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.

Knowing I'm not alone in having these experiences, I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood's biggest films, to get to the bottom of what's going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be "professional suicide" to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they're the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility. 

TLDR:

its hard to hear words in movies because

1. directors like Christopher Nolan record fuzzy dialogue to make it more "realistic"

2. actors mumble or whisper to act their characters, and making it louder can't usually make the words clear in the finished movie

3. microphones have to be placed away from visual setpieces so they can't be seen in the finished movie, making it harder to put them where they can record the best audio

4. sound designers not being respected and time crunches with production mean they're often told to "fix it in post" (while editing the film) instead of being allowed to record good audio

5. people add extra sounds because they can add them easier now

6. working on a movie for so long means you can get so used to hearing the fuzzy words correctly that you don't realize other people can't understand it

7. sometimes movies are released too loud, and so movie theaters turn down the volume for all movies, making normal-volume movies too quiet

8. movie theater employees are more inexperienced and play the movie as it is originally, instead of making sure it sounds good like they did when they used projectors

9. some streaming platforms compress the audio too much, making it low quality and too hard to understand

10. tvs also sometimes change how the audio sounds

11. not all films have their sound changed by the people making it to sound good on a home tv

the article ends by talking about ways to fix all this, mostly by educating people about why sound design is important

Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright

I’m curious, you guys tell me how you distinguish between your two sets of grandparents when speaking (or how you did it as a kid). Was it always Grandma [Lastname] or Grandpa [Firstname], or did one or both sets of grandparents have nicknames? (Like Nana or Papa.)

*exports you as a jpeg* *and turns the quality waaaaay down*

Actually half of the appeal of trc was just really intense codependent friendships and switching from regular pov to whatever the hell adam was thinking