Evil Right winger here - I loved Andor. It showed real people with gritty, imperfect lives fighting against a faceless, bureaucratic nightmare hellscape that far more closely resembled the Covid Lockdowns than Nazi Germany. There was sacrifice. Moral nuance. Struggle. And well written human characters. None of the tiring woke facade-as-human social justice warrior author-insert cardboard cutouts that Disney has been spoon-feeding it's mOdErN AuDiEncEs lately. You can argue all day about "media literacy" and how I "didn't get the message." But somehow, every good piece of art still points to the truth. Even if the creators don't understand why. Also... not sure where you've been since 1945, but our ideology hasn't been represented as anything OTHER than the ultimate evil for quite some time now. Believe it or not, we've gotten used to it.

What a joy, it's Kino Loy! We're honored to be joined by film critic @siddhantadlakha to ANDORKS as we continue our way through "Narkina 5" (both the episode and the prison)! We talk fascism, prison labor, Cerveza Cristal, chinamaxxing, and more. 🎧 @ podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Thinking about Paul Giamatti’s performance during this scene in THE HOLDOVERS 🥺

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: nymag.visitlink.me/w6Bu9N

Top 5 celebrity sightings (in no order): -David Cross at a Silverlake Junction party -Kate Winslet at Malibu Ralph's -Lighting Matthew Perry's cig outside a theater -Peeing next to Marilyn Manson at Arclight Hollywood -Richard Kind on a street within 24 hrs of moving to NYC

IATSE is ON STRIKE against CoComelon: The Melon Patch, a live-action spin-off of the union-made animated series. Rather than provide fair wages and benefits to the crew the producer is trying to hire scabs for the production that’s shooting in Sun Valley, Calif.

🚨: Eight Marines outsmarted a DARPA AI meant to spot people. Two somersaulted 300 meters, two snuck under a cardboard box, and one pretended to be a tree—and the AI missed them all, because it was trained to catch people walking.

The word of the day is HABIBI! Happy #ArabAmericanHeritageMonth from Ramy Youssef, Elmo, and all of your friends on Sesame Street!

Sen. Mike Crapo just blocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren's last-ditch attempt to preserve the IRS's free Direct File program. In the last election cycle, Crapo was the top GOP congressional recipient of campaign contributions from the corporate PAC of TurboTax's parent company.