I agree, although I think the elephant in the room is the pressures of capitalism.

Image, for a second, if money didn’t matter. Image if the crew all divided up the earnings. There’s no investment return, regardless of performance.

What kind of movies would Sony make? How many of them?

The answer would probably be “the kind of movies people who like to make movies like to watch” and “However many they have worthwhile scripts and people for.”

The entire problem they’re trying to solve is “how do we maximize returns in a world in which audiences want artistic quality and are clearly irate with is for trying to maximize returns instead of artistic quality?”

All of this is downstream of that misalignment in priority. If the studio had the same goal as the audience, I think their product would reflect that.

I’m grateful that sometimes art gets made, but the insurable appetite for free money by the investor class really seems to be the weight that is drowning the film industry.

This looks good!

It looks a little overstuffed, but No Way Home managed to execute a very overstuffed film successfully, so I’m hopeful they know what they’re doing.

Organic webbing seems like a very weird choice, but I can live with it.

You know, there’s a solid case to be made for what you’re saying, but you should know you’re not doing a good job of making it.

I think there are people who would agree that the choices seem shallow or pandering (not a claim I’m making, just recognizing others might). But if you don’t say clearly why the writing disappoints you, you don’t have any justification to be indignant when people assume that it’s because you’re a bigot.

I’m not accusing you of that. I’m just telling you how your comment reads.

Setting aside a tiny fraction of people who – as Diane points out in the article – make their living farming outrage, does anyone actually care about a gay character on Star Trek in the year 2026?

Also, I assume that many of the Klingons we’ve seen on Star Trek over the years were gay. I think he’s just the first Klingon which was identified to the audience as gay.

Yeah. I feel bad being to harsh when some tried to make something, but I thought this was going to be describing what the show would be like if it was written and produced now. Reacting to a 30 year old show as though it we’re made now is not only far less funny, it makes no sense. Yeah: TV production was very different 30 years ago. If it were made now, it wouldn’t be made that way.

Send help looks interesting.

I think overall MoM had a lot of story problems. I can’t say I loved what Raimi made, but there was so much that I think was wrong in the script that I can’t really say how Raimi performed as a director.

This article doesn’t really seem to have anything particularly new to say. It kind of feels like grist for the content mill.

That said, I’ll take any opportunity given to say that I’m one of the people this movie clearly was for. I liked it a lot, and I think time will be kind to it. I suspect that in hindsight, more folks will recognize it as ahead of its time.

I think the most natural candidates would be Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2.

I’m mixed. I though the first season was kind of a mess, so I am not surprised. I hoped that maybe a second would be better, but also I find that this isn’t really typically the case, so I’m guessing if they had made this I wouldn’t have cared for it. So I’m not sure how to feel.

Well, I guess there’s always the comics.

Personally, I do want a common communication platform for people I despise because I want to be able to keep tabs on their public announcements. Also, I don’t want any tech platform to have sole authority over who can communicate, as in the present, that will invariably work against the left more than the right.

I do not want to share close proximity to them on a network graph, or regularly engage with their supporters, though. So I agree that federation is crucial. But to be clear, it’s not because I want to ban them from a platform, it’s because I want managed distance and better moderation.

I don’t mind Bluesky verifying them, but I’m glad that on Mastodon I don’t have to share the same giant server as them.

These are good questions.

I hope they didn’t just goof.

I think that if we want new folks, it would make a big difference is we organized the equivalent of a new member drive.

Currently, look at a default front page for your home instance and ask how enticing it is to a total newbie. There might be some good stuff, but it’s foreign and overwhelming. You feel out of place.

Now imagine if the first Friday of January had been “new subscriber day”. People on Reddit and Bluesky are taking about the fediverse and if it’s any good. And on Lemmy there’s a bunch of posts about finding the best instances and memes about being new on Lemmy. That’s a much more inviting beginner experience, and it makes it more likely for folks to come back the next day.

I really think planning for bursts of new folks is the way to welcome people.

This, 100%.

If I apologize to you, the apology is but the words themselves: it’s the contract I make with you. It’s a memorandum of understanding of how I fucked up and a promise not to do so again.

LLMs can write words, but they cannot understand their actions or make honest promises to modify their behavior. They cannot be accountable in any way. Blaming them is like an actual scapegoat: a blameless things meant to have a debt if sin transferred to it before it’s sacrificed. Expect we’re not even getting the sacrifice.

That doesn’t say much.

What’s going on with X-Men? I thought they were going to get rebooted?

I think it’d be very cool if they approached challenges like a hacker.

Instead of just tricking a target with a direct approach, use illusions to trick targets into helping them trick secondary targets.

Surveil a target to find out what a family member’s voice sounds like in order to imitate it.

Use an illusory object to feign that you’ve taken something to bait someone into an over reaction that gets them in trouble.

That kind of manipulation.

Neat.

I’ve been listening to the podcast Greatest Gen, where they’ve been doing a watch-through of Enterprise, and it’s fun to listen to. It sounds like a better show than the reputation gives it, but also really unbalanced in terms of cast attention.

Is that universal on Star Trek? I feel like TNG was overwhelmingly focused on Picard, Ricker, and Data,. Then Troi and Geordi were present by being associated to Riker and Data and each got like one or two episodes a season where they were the star. And Worf would get a few eps a season, but was usually around. It wasn’t even attention, but there was some balance.

From the watch-through on Greatest Gen, it seems like Trip Tucker was one of the three main characters, Phlox was a constant presence even if rarely the main character, and then Mayweather and Hoshi got like one episode a season in which they were even involved.

You know what? That’s a mean things to say.

Be nice to him. It’s his first day.

all I keep wondering is why I didn’t try this sooner.

I think your experience is the most common way people first try Linux: most people first try Linux when they have a computer that is no longer valuable to them.

That was what happened to me. I had a Windows laptop that was running too slow for use, and a friend suggested setting up a Linux partition before I bought a new one. I did, and got another two years out of the laptop.

Now I see a lot of libraries and hackerspaces offering folks help doing this.

I haven’t watched this video, but I just want to say that the use of the term “Clanker” is really stupid, imo.

AI agents aren’t sentient (yet, at least). They are a tool or puppet of people who are doing this shit. Yelling at an LLM is as dumb as getting into a fight with a ventriloquist dummy after the ventriloquist made fun of you.