basuluk chandria keltan
Cristhian Cinq-Mars
The first season was good and featured some interesting story turns, like one of the Get Down crew playing a Grandmaster Flash mixtape at a party without authorization, and the consequences that spurred such a transgression. The burning desire for newer, more expensive equipment that could produce better quality sounds amid crushing poverty was also a recurring theme, as was the relationship between the main character Ezekiel (Justice Smith) and Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola), the beautiful up-and-coming singing talent of South Bronx disco.
As was the case in the 1983 film Wild Style, often referred to as the first hiphop movie, The Get Down captures the incredible amount of urban decay that was so prevalent in the South Bronx during this period. Blocks and blocks of rubble strewn fields, broken down and abandoned buildings, and stripped down cars as far as the eye can see serve as characters in both stories. Ezekiel, aka Zeke, aka Books the Wordsmith, attempts to straddle two opposite worlds as he serves as an intern for a powerful Manhattan political figure while in the process of applying to Yale. Zeke, Shaolin, a true child of the streets, and the rest of the crew struggle with what it means to "make it" in hiphop, before anyone even really knew what it meant to do so.
General Woundwort, the villain, has invaded the new home of the protagonists. Woundwort is a vicious giant of a rabbit. No rabbit dares to stand against him. He rules his territory with fear and pain, and in the end, he is able to even wound a dog during his final scrabble.
Hazel, the small, unassuming leader, has told Bigwig, the loyal soldier, to hold his position until he gets back. Bigwig fights Woundwort to a standstill inside the close confines of the warren. Woundwort is bigger than Bigwig, but Bigwig is smart and tenacious (and plenty big himself.) They are both wounded.
This brings Woundwort up short. He had assumed that Bigwig was the Chief Rabbit because Bigwig was the biggest and strongest. It would never occur to him that Hazel, the small rabbit he met earlier, was the Chief. This realization sends fear through Woundwort and his ranks because they think there is a bigger rabbit out there somewhere. After all, why would a fighter like Bigwig recognize a smaller rabbit as his Chief?
But Bigwig is absolutely loyal to Hazel, and he is loyal because Hazel has shown himself to be a leader with skin in the game, to take risks, and to implement bold ideas. Watership Down is partly a story about how Hazel earns the trust of those under him.
Watership Down is a book about rabbits seeking out a new home. Along the way, they must overcome various challenges, from predators to tyrants from other warrens. Richard Adams, the author, infuses the story with mythology and a language that would have made Tolkien proud, and you\u2019ll never look at a rabbit the same way again.
Netflix released a Watership Down miniseries in 2018. Spoiler alert: it\u2019s not good. The production values and voice talents are fine, but it showed such a profound misunderstanding of some of the book's main themes that it made me wonder whether they read the book or just relied on a quick outline generated by an intern. I\u2019m not a stickler for absolute accuracy when it comes to movie and TV adaptations, but betraying the theme and what a character stood for in the source material is unforgivable.
There is the typical feminist nonsense they litter in the story, so the does, the female rabbits, are also soldiers. That gets an eye-roll, but that\u2019s expected crap smeared on the top. Hopefully, you can still dig down past it and find an unsullied core underneath. But it gets worse.
In the miniseries, after Hazel tells Bigwig to guard the run, he turns around, as if having a sudden flash of thought, and tells Bigwig what to say to Woundwort. To say that \u201CMy Chief Rabbit told me to defend this run\u2026\u201D
Notice what this does to the scene. It is no longer about the tenacity, courage, and loyalty of Bigwig. It is about another trick that Hazel wants to play because he has discerned how Woundwort thinks. Bigwig\u2019s great victory is reduced to nothing more than a cheap ruse. The writers obviously don\u2019t understand the power of loyalty, nor do they understand the importance of good leadership.
Netflix ended the year on a high note. The company added 7.66 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2022, easily topping the 4.5 million average estimate of Wall Street analysts. Revenue, at $7.85 billion, was in line with estimates, while earnings, at 12 cents per share, fell well below the same period a year ago. The company forecast that its profit margin and free cash flow would improve in the year ahead.
Sarandos and Peters must guide Netflix through a turbulent time in the media industry. The company just reported its slowest year of subscriber growth since 2011, the year it split its streaming business from its DVD-by-mail service. Shares in the company lost half of their value last year, while its growing frugality alienated some of the creative people who once hailed Netflix as a champion of the arts.
Hastings has been signaling he would step aside for a few years. He elevated Sarandos to co-CEO in 2020 and named Peters COO at the same time. He already delegated almost all Hollywood decisions to Sarandos, and has gradually pulled back from the day-to-day affairs of the business.
He took the company public and guided Netflix through its triumphant tussle with the video rental chain Blockbuster. Hastings introduced a streaming service in 2007 and four years later separated the streaming service from the DVD-by-mail service. That maneuver proved to be his single biggest flub at Netflix since it amounted to a 60% price increase for its customers. He also gave the streaming service the unfortunate name of Qwikster. The company lost 800,000 customers and its stock fell more than 70%.
Netflix said it is pleased with its progress and that the advertising tier has attracted new, cost-sensitive customers. Most of the people picking the advertising tier are new customers, not people downgrading from a higher-priced plan. The company had almost doubled the price of its most popular plan over the last decade.
2024 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.
On Friday morning, internet users all over the United States attempted to log in to Twitter and Netflix, only to find that a massive cyberattack rendered them unable to connect to some of the world's most popular websites. Despite fixing the issue, the sites went down again later in the day, victim to another attack. After a third hit, the problem was finally brought under control.
While the identity of the attackers is still unknown, experts have figured out how they attack was carried out. Taking advantage of a botnet of internet-enabled devices, possibly with publicly available source code, hackers were able to clog up traffic to major websites, effectively shutting out human users with an army of automated bots. The scale and success of the attack is causing many companies and organizations to reevaluate their approach to protect websites and consumers from this kind of vulnerability in the future.
The sites that went down, which included CNN and The New York Times, were all customers of Dyn DNS Company, a company that specializes in online infrastructure. One of the company's main functions is to translate human-readable inputs into IP addresses, which can then be used to route online traffic in an efficient manner. But this function was disrupted on Friday when hackers launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on DNS servers. As The Christian Science Monitor's Story Hinckley explained:
In order to overload these servers, hackers turned to a malware program known as Mirai. The program takes over network-enabled items such as CCTV cameras, DVRs, and even innocuous household items, networking them together into a botnet to launch a barrage of requests at a target. While computers and phones have more sophisticated security equipment to resist this sort of takeover, many Internet of Things (IoT) devices do not have these protections, and can be easily taken over by hackers.
"IoT security has been horribly flawed ever since it first became a thing, largely because of the pace that new products have to go to market, and the fact that designing security is seen by vendors as 'slowing things down,'" Casey Ellis, CEO of Bugcrowd, a San Francisco-based computer security service, told the Lansing State Journal.
90f70e40cf