AshleyBank

Yes please! Just Apple Music please 🙏🏻

I just need somewhere to put my purse….

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In The Anxious Generation, I underestimated the harm from the phone-based childhood because I focused on the mental health outcomes, which is where we had the best data while I was writing the book. I now believe that the widespread diminishment of the human capacity to pay attention is an even larger harm, affecting the majority of children, and even many adults. Diminished focus, executive function, and book-reading means diminished life chances.

Playing hard to get is a waste of time. Acting like you don't care is a form of self gaslighting. Feeling big, loving hard, and giving everything is who you are. Own it. It what makes you unique in a numb, disconnected world.

Many college professors are discovering that students learn less when they have laptops open. Many of us are banning their use in class. Putting computers and tablets on students desks in K-12 may turn out to be among the costliest mistakes in the history of education

The way I look at all these AI clips floating around is like a dog that can walk on its hind legs. "Wow," I think to myself. "It's amazing it can do that." The first time you see the trick it's impressive. But after 30 seconds or so, it starts to get old and you ask "What else can it do?" And then the dog drops down to all fours and it just looks like a regular dog again. You can put a sweater on it or a little hat but it would never fool you into thinking it's a human being. And it will never be able to do all the things that humans can. So far AI is a neat trick and that's all it is. And of course it will get better – a lot better. But the best thing it can do is approximate what people are already doing which in this case is making movies. Yes it will be able to do it faster and cheaper. And no doubt it will cost a lot of people their jobs. It may even mean that one person given enough compute can make an entire feature film on their own. But filmmaking is a collaborative process that involves the expertise of very many talented people. Sure you can tell the AI to dress all the extras in period costume that's appropriate to the time and place. But that's not the same thing as what costume designers do. They're thinking about color and the composition of the shot and the mood the scene is trying to evoke and a thousand other things. Whereas the AI will always choose something generic based on the choices that real costume designers have made in the past. And unless our keyboard auteur has studied the history of clothing the way the costumers have how would they even know if it's historically accurate? This applies to just about everything a crew member other than the director does: camera, lighting, production design – all of it. If we're talking about actors how would our screenbound visionary know what a good performance is let alone what to tell the AI to do to refine and improve it? Actors can study acting all their lives and still not do it well. But we're thinking an AI can? Maybe it can make a face look sad but can it make a face that makes the audience feel sad too? It remains to be seen. A movie is the sum of thousands of choices that various people have made. And if you leave those choices up to the AI you're going to end up with something that is mediocre at best. Because the AI takes the average of everything that's been fed into it. Now I haven't even mentioned what the writer does which is what concerns most of you. Who here has written a feature length screenplay and how many choices do you think went into it? From basic concept all the way down to individual word choice. There's no way to count but I'd say tens of thousands if not more. Some of which are ideas and feelings that spring up from the unconscious mind. Now an AI makes those choices too but it can't base them upon personal experience. It has to go back and look at the work that other writers have done in the past. It can't innovate. So once again you end up with something average, mediocre, and generic. I read scripts like that all day long and none of them make it to the screen. So yes a dog that can stand on its hind legs can imitate what a person does at least for a little while. But at the end of the day it's still a dog.

All these posts about how AI is going to destroy Hollywood because soon you'll be able to make an entire feature film on your laptop with only a few prompts. What a bunch of bullshit. Leaving aside the fact that most of these reels people are posting look like hot garbage. We all know it's going to get better and better. Movies are still star driven. Tom Cruise might sell his likeness someday but you'll never be able to afford it and if you use it without permission you'll never be able to monetize it. Or you'll just get sued. What about animated or fully digital films? They still use actors whose names you all know to do the voices. Even AVATAR uses real actors for motion capture. Why? Because acting is a talent. But here's the part everybody forgets. If you have access to all this technology then so does Hollywood and their tech will always be much much better than yours. Suddenly, you're not competing with these bloated $100M+ productions. It gets cheaper and easier for them too. So any advantage you think you may have had has evaporated just like that. Anyway that's not the hard part. It never was. Movies are about more than spectacle. Otherwise we could sit there and watch car crashes and explosions for two hours. What's required is storytelling ability. Invest your time in learning that rather than the latest AI image generator. I have no doubt that these platforms will enable people to do amazing things with them. But at the end of the day the only ones who get rich off of this won't be you. It'll be the platforms themselves.

@RKing618 One hundred percent. Watching saving private ryan was a visceral emotional experience. This is so empty. There’s ao much more to storytelling than making it look visually “real”.

I liked it better when it was called SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and the screen direction made more sense.

#ASmokyMountainChristmas, directed by @hwinkler4real, and starring @DollyParton, Lee Majors, Dan Hedaya, Anita Morris, John Ritter, René Auberjonois, @AshleyBank, @DannyCooksey, Marc Dakota Robinson & Jean Speegle, premiered on @ABCNetwork today in 1986. #DollyParton #Christmas

James Clear: The ability to bounce back quickly is a key skill in life.

The more time students spend on screens, the less they learn. Ed tech does not belong in schools (until it is thoroughly tested & proven to help). Excerpt from Jared Cooney Horvath's excellent new book, The Digital Delusion, in @TheFP thefp.com/p/we-gave-stud…

I think the three big reasons to care about the continued viability of moviegoing in theaters are (roughly) 1: economic, 2: aesthetic, and 3: spiritual/social. First: making movies is expensive, and streaming as a revenue source still doesn't compare to theatrical receipts...

You are right, most adult conversations feel like performance reviews with snacks. “So how’s work, how’s family, did you see that horrible thing on the news.” It is like everyone secretly believes they have to justify their existence every time they open their mouth. Metrics, grief, opinions. No play. No nonsense. No “what if we were clouds, which one would you be.” Just constant proof that we are informed and appropriately upset. It is exhausting. Your lungs cannot stay in outrage mode forever. If you want out, you almost have to be rude about it. Start answering checklist questions with sideways entries. “How’s work” - “my coworker chews like a horse and I think it is healing my perfectionism.” “Did you hear about X” - “yeah, I did, it is awful, also I have been thinking about what my 8 year old self would think of my kitchen sponge.” People either blink and retreat or they loosen. You will feel stupid for three seconds, then suddenly you are talking about pretend game shows in your house or what your funeral playlist would be. That is play. Not childish, just alive. Hold the belief that conversation can be useless and still holy. Then defend that like a hobby.

I wish I cold screenshot this and replace my x icon with it

Here’s why so much of today’s entertainment feels mediocre. For most of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the major studios owned the theaters. That system ended in 1948 with the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures. The Paramount Decrees forced the Big Five studios to divest their theater chains and banned practices like block booking. The result? Studios no longer had a guaranteed screen for every film they made. If a movie was bad, theater owners simply wouldn’t book it. Survival required quality—studios had to compete on merit. The same logic held through the home-video and television eras. Studios made the discs, but they didn’t own Target, Best Buy, or Blockbuster. Networks made shows, but every program lived or died by Nielsen ratings and advertiser dollars. There was friction, transparency, and real risk. Then streaming arrived. In 2020, a federal judge officially terminated the Paramount Decrees, declaring them obsolete in a world dominated by Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and the rest. The irony is brutal: streaming has recreated vertical integration on steroids. The same companies now control production and the only theaters that matter—their own apps. Unlike the old studio-owned cinema chains, these platforms don’t have to disclose viewership numbers because the business model is subscription-based, not per-ticket or ad-supported. Metrics are secret. Accountability is gone. Because every subscriber dollar flows into the same corporate pool regardless of what is watched, the streamers have zero financial incentive to pay market rates—or any real money at all—for outside independent films and series. Why license an indie movie for $10–20 million when you can spend that and more on an in-house project that keeps 100 % of the upside, strengthens your IP library, and is guaranteed top-of-app promotion? Independents are now forced to sell their work for flat, often insultingly low fees (or give it away entirely for “exposure”) because the platform already has a full slate of self-produced content it will always prioritize. The gate is not just closed, the gatekeeper owns the only road. With no obligation to report performance, studios face zero external pressure to justify budgets. They can greenlight endless in-house projects that are guaranteed distribution, while acquiring outside films or series for pennies on the dollar—if they bother at all. Independent producers are left begging for scraps or shut out entirely. This is monopoly power the 1948 Court never imagined: total control of both creation and exhibition, insulated from market feedback. When studios and theaters were forcibly separated, independent cinema flourished because talent and good ideas could still find an audience. Today a handful of tech-entertainment giants own the entire pipeline in a way even the old moguls couldn’t dream off. Monopolies aren't capitalist. We prevent them to open real competition, innovation, quality, and the occasional movie that wasn't filtered through a Teslabot in Netflix's HR wearing an Apple Vision Pro.

@IsabelSteckel What do we do when we’re both the personality hire? 🫣😂

every marriage has a personality hire and then someone who knows how insurance works

I'm a single issue voter, I want the warm lights back. Streetlights are too blue. Headlights are too bright. It's a crime against nature and God. We need to demand 2800K or below color balance for all outdoor lights. Some cities regulate 3000k max, that's still too damn blue.

@LukeBarnett Exactly! It feels like gross clickbait to me. If it were true they wouldn’t be talking about it, but would be making the deal and then announcing it. The lady doth protest…

Yeah? Name them.

I think about this moment whenever I think about her as an actress. It’s such an honest moment.