The book does a good job of showing how Vito built his organization bit by bit. He quietly amassed power without doing a lot of killing. He was feared, and that was enough.
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I think I like 4chan screenshots because of the timestamp.
Everything else is like “2 minutes ago” but it’s a screencap from 2014.
Even tells you the day of the week.
I absolutely hate fuzzy dates, not only because of the problem you mentioned, but also because they can get wildly inaccurate. For example, on youtube I often see something counted as posted a year ago, but if I look at the absolute timestamp, it was actually 1 year and 10 months. That's too big of a difference to truncate.
This shit is so annoying on GitHub. I feel like changes to a codebase are something that really makes sense to describe in hard dates and times. Telling me that some dumbass (me) introduced a bug "3 months ago" is not enough info, especially when it was actually 3 months and 24 days.
It's a user friendly design.
2026-02-23 12:01 is so much 'harder' to parse at a glance than 1 minute ago.
Obviously this doesn't care about archival or screenshots, it's for the user looking at the live page.
I think it would be nice if sites offered option to toggle, but most have no reason for the extra investment.
I've never gotten the mass appeal of The Godfather series, personally. But I like a lot of shit movies, so I can't pass judgement.
It was a leap forward in gangster movies. The genre had peaked in the 1920-30's, then it flipped to becoming more detective/police focused in the 1940's forward. The gangster film was fairly dead by the 70's. The entire vibe you think of as a modern 'gangster movie vibe' is The Godfather.
There's a lot of movies that don't exist without The Godfather coming first. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) was Sergio Leone's attempt to do the same sort of thing. Which was meant to be 2 movies. Goodfellas (1990) also borrows a lot, but gives a significantly faster pace to the storytelling. The gangster film was pretty much reborn anew, all in the wake of the success of The Godfather.
If you tried to make any sort of gangster movie today, you might not even realize you were borrowing from it. It's genre defining.
The mob boss: it's not how you kill, it's who you kill.
Like that old joke about the technician. $5 for the hammer. $1995 for knowing what to hit.
He was cunning because he almost always knew who would come at him and how. Not how he was going to kill somebody, although there was that.
To be frank, that's a lot fucking smarter than most villains who tell the good guys their entire plan or take hostages expecting to win them over.
Well, go try to outmaneuver five established crime families and coordinate a simultaneous attack in a way that none of them get a chance at retaliation. Let us know how that goes, then we can start understanding the levels to "cunning".
Edit- and aside from Sollozzo to avenge Vito, Michael didn't shoot anyone.
When you come to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.
Everyone said the third one was shit. But it was the pentultimant consequence of Michael's success. He was all alone at the end, a victim of his own ruthlessness and success. It completed the arc.
It is possible for a movie to both correctly complete an arc and also be shit.
Funny thing.
When you said 'the third one' I thought you were referring to Fredo.
But I see that you meant the third movie. Even re-editied, I don't want to see it.
I never thought it was shit. For sure, it was the weakest of the three by a pretty good measure, but it does end the story decently enough. Plus, considering the success of the first two, there was nowhere to go but down with the third one!
The third one was mostly ruined by the fact that Sofia Coppola couldn't act. The scenes between her and Andy Garcia were verging on painful to watch. But yes, the bits of the film that were about Michael were good, actually.
Keep it simple, sweetie
Capitalism encapsulated: They sell you “meritocracy”, you get a suicide machine.
Also, these Neo-feudalist freaks, the one thing they don’t seem to understand is that when you set up a mafia infrastructure, it’s only a matter of time before one of your capos shoots a hellfire missile up your asshole and takes your place. You want Rome, you get Rome, complete with the Praetorian Guard.
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