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Lady Horatia

@mediumacolyte

Film critic living in Italy. I write about whatever I feel like at any moment on my medium profile: https://medium.com/@lady-horatia

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21.06.2024
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Latest posts by Lady Horatia @mediumacolyte

Preview
‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and the Nature of Coming of Age Richard Linklater shows us that we are not alone when we grow up

"Richard Linklater’s semi-rotoscoped animated film about a ten-and-a-half-year-old going to space captures the essence of coming-of-age..."

#movies #Medium

medium.com/theuglymonst...

06.03.2026 11:46 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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‘Adiós Cuba’: Why Do Cubans Leave Cuba? ‘Adiós Cuba’ sheds some light on history’s most misunderstood migration

"According to some calculations the embargo has cost Cuba around $130 billion since its inception."

#movies

medium.com/theuglymonst...

05.03.2026 21:44 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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‘One Battle After Another’, ‘Eddington’ and the Neo-Silent Cinema of the 2020s Silence can be both loud and inspire revolution, or quiet and inspire complicity

"It is no mystery that capitalism frequently subsumes revolution; the reasons, processes, and nature of it are well understood."

#Oscars #movies

medium.com/theuglymonst...

05.03.2026 02:03 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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The Thin Red Line — “Every film about war ends up being pro-war” Terrence Malick #3

"The Thin Red Line is an epic in a traditional Hollywood sense. It is a War Epic in a more precise sense. Neither of these labels do the film justice."

#movies #GiftArticle

medium.com/theuglymonst...

02.03.2026 06:13 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ and the Nature of Colonial Violence James Cameron abandons all nuance for revolutionary fervour

"The ‘Avatar’ saga has never been well known for its originality, but I think it is here...that Cameron transcends his clichés, tropes, and shortcomings to make a valiant statement."

#scifi #movies

medium.com/theuglymonst...

28.02.2026 21:46 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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‘Nickel Boys’ Unearths the Ugliness Buried Within America This film is not just about one particularly abusive correctional school

"The legacy of the land of freedom and dreams is built on and steeped in the suffering of the subaltern. In the case of ‘Nickel Boys’ it is Black Americans."

medium.com/theuglymonst...

26.02.2026 19:55 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Yasujirō Ozu, Japanese Film, and the Nature of Tradition The “most Japanese director” challenged the tradition-modernity dialectic

"[Yasujirō] Ozu has frequently been labelled a traditional conservative, or at least sympathetic to traditional Japanese values."

#film #Japan #Medium

medium.com/theuglymonst...

26.02.2026 07:26 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate US-made thermal weapons burning at 3,500C caused 2,842 people to "evaporate" in Gaza, Al Jazeera investigation finds.

“Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”

There are no words to adequately describe the evil here.

10.02.2026 22:28 👍 12811 🔁 6985 💬 380 📌 868
10.02.2026 16:36 👍 613 🔁 100 💬 2 📌 0

💯👇

09.02.2026 13:24 👍 4974 🔁 1667 💬 22 📌 21

'Avatar: Fire and Ash' wasn't as well received as the rest but I thought it had the nuance that many want from this sci-fi saga.

#movies #philosophy #politics #avatar

10.02.2026 10:59 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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‘Nickel Boys’ Unearths the Ugliness Buried Within America This film is not just about one particularly abusive correctional school

"‘Nickel Boys’ opens with one of the most universal human senses: touch. The film is demanding that we relate to its story. It wants us not just to see but to perceive."

#film

medium.com/theuglymonst...

10.02.2026 04:30 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
A 2 panel sketch disgram of a 1 meter tall pod. in the second panel, an oval section pops off and a demonic little face with short tentacles flies out, crudely drawn.

A 2 panel sketch disgram of a 1 meter tall pod. in the second panel, an oval section pops off and a demonic little face with short tentacles flies out, crudely drawn.

My favorite artifact in the "you don't need AI to do art" discourse is, of course, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's sketch of the facehugger to explain it to Giger.

07.02.2026 18:39 👍 9158 🔁 2830 💬 77 📌 92
Iron Man meme, edited, Obadiah Stane yelling, "Your ancestors made timeless art in a cave! With berries and ash!"

Iron Man meme, edited, Obadiah Stane yelling, "Your ancestors made timeless art in a cave! With berries and ash!"

"I need AI to make art, human art is only for the rich and privileged-"

06.02.2026 19:29 👍 14562 🔁 5556 💬 64 📌 56
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Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

05.02.2026 11:50 👍 32279 🔁 13862 💬 589 📌 1596

we are maybe a few years away from the rise of revenue-sharing newsletter collectives. it'll be a controversy-ridden disaster until someone gets it right and suddenly it becomes a dominant model, and then a year or two later we'll look around and realize we just reinvented newspapers

04.02.2026 22:27 👍 135 🔁 34 💬 1 📌 1

in any case I hope this is an eye opener for any folks who think having a lot of followers on social media (of any platform) must have it made. about 0.28% of my followers have bought and read my latest comic haha. sm is not NOTHING but it's also not that meaningful in the grand scheme of things

05.02.2026 04:17 👍 363 🔁 111 💬 7 📌 3

saying "they have their flaws" of the Matrix Sequels is like saying Van Gogh's later work is good despite the ways it flaunts the rules of classical art. the art is in the friction of choice. highbrow or lowbrow, love it or hate it, good art is a series of choices no one else would/could have made

01.02.2026 21:40 👍 40 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 0
screenshot of the first two paragraphs of a tumblr ask response. the last line is cut off in the middle, meant to entice readers to click through and read the rest. hint hint.

Anonymous asked:

How do you feel about AI upscaling?

hms-no-fun responded:

bad. i haven't done much in the way of research on the current meta of "AI" upscaling technology so maybe there's some magical new trick that's suddenly made it work good, but i doubt it. what i can speak to is practical use cases i've found in the wild.

on the amateur/consumer end, upscaling gets used to transform low resolution media into high resolution media. you see this a lot with documentary footage from the turn of the 20th century, where horsedrawn carriages are romping down the dirt roads of new york city in 4k60fps and colorized from black and white. like most things "AI"-related, this has a window of genuinely impressive novelty that lasts for about twenty seconds, maybe up to a minute if the result is decent. wow, it's like i'm looking through a window into the past! pretty quickly though you start noticing the smear frames, the interpolated faces, the hallucinated artifacts. watching these upscales for any real length of time, for me at least, rapidly approaches nausea-inducing. most information present in these videos is artificial, which is basically

screenshot of the first two paragraphs of a tumblr ask response. the last line is cut off in the middle, meant to entice readers to click through and read the rest. hint hint. Anonymous asked: How do you feel about AI upscaling? hms-no-fun responded: bad. i haven't done much in the way of research on the current meta of "AI" upscaling technology so maybe there's some magical new trick that's suddenly made it work good, but i doubt it. what i can speak to is practical use cases i've found in the wild. on the amateur/consumer end, upscaling gets used to transform low resolution media into high resolution media. you see this a lot with documentary footage from the turn of the 20th century, where horsedrawn carriages are romping down the dirt roads of new york city in 4k60fps and colorized from black and white. like most things "AI"-related, this has a window of genuinely impressive novelty that lasts for about twenty seconds, maybe up to a minute if the result is decent. wow, it's like i'm looking through a window into the past! pretty quickly though you start noticing the smear frames, the interpolated faces, the hallucinated artifacts. watching these upscales for any real length of time, for me at least, rapidly approaches nausea-inducing. most information present in these videos is artificial, which is basically

just posted a little essay about "AI" upscaling and why i'm not a fan.

www.tumblr.com/hms-no-fun/8...

28.01.2026 00:15 👍 121 🔁 34 💬 3 📌 0

Almost every reason people have for defunding or abolishing ICE is also a reason to defund or abolish the police, yet many people who are rightly calling for action against ICE would never come close to doing to the same for police. But this fight goes beyond just ICE. ICE represents a larger issue.

27.01.2026 02:20 👍 560 🔁 195 💬 6 📌 2
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‘Christine’: The Violence of Possession Possession makes you paranoic, and paranoia makes you violent

"Cars are an extension of colonial rhetoric, except in reverse. Where colonial subjects are dehumanized and de-personalized, cars are humanized, personified and anthropomorphized."

#horror #movies

medium.com/theuglymonst...

25.01.2026 23:23 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

The Deporter-in-Chief finally chimes in. Fun fact: under Obama, ICE and Border Patrol’s budgets exploded, dozens died in detention, and over 3,000 people were killed at the border by the bipartisan policy of “prevention through deterrence.”

25.01.2026 18:25 👍 469 🔁 156 💬 5 📌 2

it is a moral imperative that we abolish prisons

18.01.2026 19:44 👍 124 🔁 47 💬 0 📌 0

Rest in peace to a king of cinema. There will never be one quite like you Lynch. You left a hole within us all. You're my favourite director and this is my best article ever. I wonder if it would have you happy.

#lynch #movies #film

17.01.2026 23:40 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
David Lynch sitting in a naturally lit room and wearing sunglasses: “I’m wearing dark glasses today, because I’m seeing the future and the future is looking very bright.”

David Lynch sitting in a naturally lit room and wearing sunglasses: “I’m wearing dark glasses today, because I’m seeing the future and the future is looking very bright.”

David Lynch passed a year ago today. I hope we all can absorb just a little bit of the energy he put out in his lifetime.

16.01.2026 18:47 👍 6320 🔁 1672 💬 4 📌 46

Progress is a myth. Maybe we'd do well to interrogate that myth.

#philosophy #arcane #politics

16.01.2026 16:10 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

If you’re anti-ICE but not anti-cop you are missing the whole entire point.

15.01.2026 02:58 👍 2254 🔁 621 💬 20 📌 17

Have been reading lots of prehistory and learned that prior to the emergence of agriculture 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers invented ceramics, sewing/weaving, and sea-worthy boats. Don't think they get enough credit for amazing innovations that still impact our lives today.

15.01.2026 15:27 👍 65 🔁 15 💬 3 📌 0
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‘Escritor’: Writing as a Weapon Rodolfo Walsh was the father of investigative journalism, but he was also a revolutionary

"It is less a biopic than an adaptation of one very particular moment in Walsh’s career: the birth of his revolutionary journalism."

#movie #Argentina

medium.com/theuglymonst...

12.01.2026 00:23 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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‘One Battle After Another’, ‘Eddington’ and the Neo-Silent Cinema of the 2020s Silence can be both loud and inspire revolution, or quiet and inspire complicity

"What most stood out to me about ‘One Battle After Another’ was not its shallow (and dangerous) representations, but rather its nature as a work which is subsumed to capital."

#GiftArticle #GoldenGlobes

medium.com/theuglymonst...

12.01.2026 07:00 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0