AI will replace your job as soon as it learns to spell and other news from the front

In the AI universe, no one can figure out what The Plan™ is, let alone what it's going to be.

 

 

 

Source: AI Snacks newsletter from magica.com. 

Surprise, surprise! Hate speech is bustin' out all over Substack

 

What I thought was a relatively innocent comment, "Show us the proof," to the assertion that "Paul Krugman has an extremely poor track record with predictions" turned into a demand that I disclose that I am "a jew." Not satisfied to leave it there, another commenter joined in to call me a "faggot boi" based on my Substack posts.

This is the relevant section of the content guidelines: 

Hate 

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

Clearly, Substack has a serious harassment/hate speech problem. Report an issue and they promise not to let you know how it was decided. Seriously. They will not share what if any action was taken when you report a content violation. 

So, what's a content creator to do? I can tell you that this one will move all of his posts off Substack and delete his account before it turns into Twittter with subscriptions. 

ETA: I flagged the comments, Tyler from Substack replied, and I responded to his e-mail.

On Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 12:43:05 PM EDT, Substack Support <support@substack.zendesk.com> wrote:#- Please type your reply above this line -##

Hi there,
 
Tyler from Substack Standards and Enforcement here. Thanks for reaching out about this. 
 
We take all reports of violations to our Content Guidelines seriously and thoroughly evaluate them. Though we're unable to disclose specific details about actions taken with publishers on the platform, we'll be taking any steps necessary to ensure publishers adhere to Substack's Terms of Use. Thank you. 
 
Best wishes,

Tyler @ Substack

Hello there, Tyler. Thanks for getting back to me with a vague promise of action that may or not have been taken since you can't tell me what happened.

So publishers have to adhere to the Content Guidelines but comments can contain hate speech and slurs. Got it.

Frankly, I don't see why I should have to tolerate someone calling me a "faggot boi" and Substack not doing anything about it.

 

"Departures": Caught up in a bad romance

 

 

Departures is Pillion without the humor.

The theme song is “Bad Romance,” over and over. I would have walked out if I hadn’t paid for the ticket.

It’s as if your friend with self-esteem issues (Benji, Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) tells you in excruciating detail about the dead-end relationship that just ended. As he tells the story, you can spot every red flag that he ignored but he was so besotted that he just plowed right ahead. As relationships go, it wasn’t much of one, made up of eight marijuana-laced and boozed-up weekends in Amsterdam with an enigmatic 40-something hunk (Jake, David Tag), one a month. From the start, when your friend couldn’t tell if the guy was even gay and he brought a hooker to the apartment soon after they unpacked, it was clear that there was no way it could go on.To no one’s surprise it didn’t, and to your great relief it looked he found a way to get over it. In Greek drama that’s known as a deus ex machina, and here he’s named Kieran.

The usual disclaimer about the characters in the movie not resembling anyone living or dead ends the movie. Since Lloyd Eyre-Morgan is the screenwriter, co-director, and lead I have my doubts.

Finally, I have a bone to pick with New York Times film critic Chris Azzopardi. U.K. distributor Peccadillo Pictures touted Departures as a New York Times Critic’s Pick in a recent email and that made me think I needed to see the movie before it left the IFC Center. Azzopardi wrote, “A voice to watch, Eyre-Morgan wrote Departures and directed it with Neil Ely. The film balances a mordantly funny deconstruction of romance with the harsher realities of gay life: internalized homophobia, body dysmorphia, alcoholism, sexual abuse, parental expectations to be a “happy gay.” It’s a lot, maybe too much for some. Even the camerawork feels confrontational, with tight close-ups and high angles that subjugate Benji. Departures is still tender and winsome, with graphic-novel-style animation lightening the load, but is ultimately punishing in tone. It lives by a truth that might ring familiar for gay men particularly: Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival.”

First of all, there’s nothing funny, let alone “mordantly funny.” And it’s neither tender nor winsome, though it is definitely punishing. I felt undeservedly punished at many points of its 82 minutes that felt more like 102. “Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival”? Puh-leeze, Chris. If you can show me the humor, then we can discuss how it’s a form of survival.

After that review, Chris Azzopardi joins The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody as a critic to ignore. Read the full review here (gift link): ‘Departures’ Review: Finding Levity Amid the Pain.

Today’s dive down a rabbit hole was inspired by Rodger and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, of all things. Oklahoma! is the backdrop for Richard Linklater’s movie about Lorenz Hart, Blue Moon, which takes place at Sardi’s on the night of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical’s premiere. This article in Smithsonian Magazine explores the back story of the musical and Lynn Riggs’ play, Green Grow the Lilacs, that it was based on. It turns out that there are significant links between the musical and gay history, as well as a connection to Hollywood in the 1930s.

Behind "Oklahoma!" lies the remarkable story of gay Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs

"Portentous," "monumental," "damn near endless" are all descriptions that came to mind after seeing Apocalypse Now (1979; dir. Francis Ford Coppola). The Paris Theater’s "Big and Loud" series presented the restoration of the original roadshow version, which runs just shy of three hours. When the film ended, without credits, it felt like I’d been hit repeatedly about the head and shoulders with a heavy, blunt instrument, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. There’s a lot to take in, and it takes time and reflection to make sense of the movie.

After seeing Megadoc, Mike Figgis’ documentary charting the making of Coppola’s most recent feature, Megalopolis, just the other day, I can see parallels between the two movies, despite their being made more than 40 years apart. From the evidence of the two movies, I’d say that Coppola is more interested in big themes than simple stories; in an epic scope rather than human scale; and in spotlighting operatic violence, even buckets of blood, whenever possible. He strives to reach 11 on a scale of 10, and succeeds more often than not, leaving the audience gasping in his wake. I believe the Sicilian word is stonnat' or stunned.

To recap the plot, Apocalypse Now takes place during the Vietnam War and is about Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is sent up the Nung River to find Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Green Beret who’s conducting a private war from a base in Cambodia. Along the way, Willard witnesses and participates in a string of horrific war crimes that do nothing to advance the plot, but pretty effectively traumatize the audience much as the war traumatized the soldiers who fought in it. Finally, he finds Kurtz’s base and at that point the movie turns into a dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was set in the Belgian Congo at the time of King Leopold’s worst atrocities. Not only is Kurtz certifiably insane, but a photographer (Dennis Hopper) is loose on the property and he’s floridly psychotic as only Hopper can be. Kurtz takes Willard prisoner, tortures him, then frees him, and (no spoilers) Willard has to decide if he’s going to carry out his mission. In the meantime, an ox is ritually slaughtered, serving as an on-the-nose metaphor and yet another spectacular set piece.

Coppola made Apocalypse Now, at considerable personal cost, to put the war on the screen. It was his answer to the question posed in Norman Mailer’s book Why Are We in Vietnam?, and unlike Mailer, whose answer was that the war was sublimated homosexual dominance on a grand scale, Coppola showed what the war looked like and how it destroyed the people who were sent to fight it. Tens of thousands were killed, the rest were traumatized.

The problem for me after my first viewing was that beyond showing how Captain Willard, who starts out pretty unhinged (he bloodies his fist by punching a mirror in a drunken stupor in the movie's first 10 minutes), ends up nearly catatonic after he leaves Kurtz’s compound, it seemed like there wasn’t anything else to take away about the characters. With some reflection, I changed my mind.

Willard starts out damaged and ends up wrecked by what he’s been through and what he’s had to do. The surfer, Lance (Sam Bottoms, Timothy Bottoms’ brother), is similarly wrecked, though his LSD trips shield him from the worst of the carnage he’s witnessed and participated in. And the audience should be touched in a similar way, though some people may remember the visuals more clearly than the message. This isn’t surprising, since Coppola’s message is widely understood today, more than when the film was released.

For many viewers, the spectacle is enough—the helicopter ballet to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries gave me goosebumps, the explosions were lovely, and Kurtz’s compound in a Cambodian ruin was beautiful. That Apocalypse Now is more than this, that Captain Willard becomes an empty shell to cope with his experience inside the heart of darkness, is a testament to John Milius’ script and Coppola’s vision as a director.

The Wrong Box (1966, directed by Michael Hodges; script by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, inspired by a story by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Despite its misfires, it has some marvelous performances.

Today's movie in the Museum of Modern Art's Michael Caine retrospective was The Wrong Box. It isn't bad—at best it's a shaky ⭐️⭐️⭐️ movie—but given the creative team it should have been better.

While The Wrong Box isn't quite as funny a farce as it thinks it is, there are some truly comic scenes that stand out from the stodgy bits: Ralph Richardson (Joseph Finsbury) dodging the missiles hurled by John Mills (his brother, Masterman Finsbury) as he tries to mortally wound him, thereby collecting the money in the tontine that was set up when they were boys; Peter Sellers as Dr. Pratt, surrounded by kittens and cats in his dire flat, with so many good lines that you'll have to take notes to remember them all; and the last scene when everybody's chasing everybody, the coffin ends up in the wrong carriage, and clergyman Norman Bird, who's trying desperately to conduct a funeral, is so flustered that he starts to read the marriage service. There's also a dead body that has to be dealt with, the oldest butler in London (Peacock, played by Wilfrid Lawson) who always seems on the verge of expiring, and a Salvation Army delegation that rescued Masterman after he was dumped in the Thames and brought him home when everyone thought him dead. Overall, though, it doesn't entirely rise to the level of a classic farce. It’s more of a British fruit tart than the dessert soufflé it should be.

As for the other stars, Michael Caine plays Masterman's son, Michael, as a dim bulb, which is tiresome; Peter Cook (Morris Finsbury) and Dudley Moore (John Finsbury) are his conniving cousins, doing a double act in which Cook is the smarter one and Moore is always being distracted by whichever lady is in the vicinity; and Nanette Newman (Julia Finsbury) is a beautiful but not very bright ingenue who screams at the least provocation.

If the writer of the Museum of Modern Art’s note saw the movie they wouldn’t have described Michael Caine’s role as “brief but memorable.” He has as much screen time as any of the other stars.

The Wrong Box will be screened at the Museum on Sunday, August 31 at 2 p.m. It was available from Sony in the U.S. and Indicator in the U.K., and though it seems to be out of print, it can be found on eBay. There are no streaming options.

Deal With It

I'm not napping, jerk.

The Gulf of Mexico

From J.F. Letenneur: "Exceptional onboard document of this rare and fabulous maritime atlas, a masterpiece by the greatest French hydrographer of the 18th century, with maps of all the coastlines known at the time."

Source: The David Rumsey Map Collection
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~284155~90056663:Carte-Reduite-du-Golphe-du-Mexique-?sort=pub_list_no_initialsort%2Cpub_date%2Cpub_list_no%2Cseries_no&qvq=q:Golphe%20du%20Mexique;sort:pub_list_no_initialsort%2Cpub_date%2Cpub_list_no%2Cseries_no;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&trs=20