• 171 Posts
  • 1.23K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • I am surprised it took you this long.

    The next step in this evolutionary thinking is simple. Buying hardware specs is a fool’s folly. I don’t compare hardware. Ads and marketing are totally nonsense and not worth even a slight glance. The ONLY thing that matters is what open source projects exist and what hardware do they support well. This is how I shop. Open Source or F.O.



  • My life is on a trajectory to homelessness with disability and a system that refuses to help me. This is me, in the future, being traumatized, abused, and dying in a gutter somewhere while being criminalized because a political refugee from the other side of the world had to have a driver’s license but had the cognitive capacity of a third grader. I was just commuting to work on a bicycle, a racer, upper middle class guy, working in a chain of high end bike shops. I’m you on an extremely unlucky day. You’re only one bad day away from this exact same issue.







  • I’m around 50:50, I read a lot of them but am prone to cynical hot takes on occasion. I’m particularly interested in social community and feeling like I’m at least present with others. Physical disability and in my case, the social isolation it causes–sucks. I’m here when I’m not able to do much else and need to escape. So that is my excuse for the times I’m not reading and the overly cynical hot takes.




  • Hike sound like 1st date PC to anyone? I mean, it depends on the definition of hike but someone I barely know dragging me to an isolated place in the woods somewhere sounds like a legit way to end up being drug through the woods with a much higher probability than the typical coffee shop date.

    Also, who doesn’t have work-mances without deeper meaning? I always have beer after work bros and lunch/break dates with my coworkers but that has no meaning beyond. In fact, I’ve always had a strict rule of never shit in my own back yard. If I was so inclined as to date someone from work, I would not do so until after finding a new job.



  • There’s nothing wrong with disconnecting and enjoying simple things. I love watching some kids movies too. The observation is more nuanced and refers to the way we tend to fail to see our interpersonal growth over time. We tend to see nostalgia without the influence of how we matured. It is like our memory of the thing has matured in imperceptible ways.

    I struggle for the words to really describe it outright now that I try. I’m coming from the mindset of writing my own hard science fiction universe and the perspective it has given me, especially when it comes to underlying storytelling frameworks, social/political structures, and defining what is fantasy magic.

    Like is a solar ring structure used to make antimatter safely to one way interstellar generation ships magic? It is for the scale of human economy today. Is it fantasy to imagine self replicating drones? I think it is just a matter of time and scale, where I am willing to say at kilometers scale it is possible. It is basically packaging an industrial complex in space. So that seems reasonable. However I find moving faster than causality and space navies childish nonsense. I see exceptionalism as the doctrine of a neo feudal oligarchy, and a story of inevitable tyranny of an authoritarian monster repulsive.

    I had no clue about these themes as a child, but now I can’t unsee them. I dob not think most people have or care about this kind of defined awareness, but I think these undertones exist just outside of their awareness.

    Outside of the philosophical, just telling a congruent story is critical, and those failures are egregious in any story.



  • I think a lot of that is a product of the bottleneck of information and media back then. People went to the movies because there wasn’t as much to do or sources of information. There were not a dozen films competing for your patronage in the same way as in more recent times. The world moved more conservatively slowly where calculating risk was very different. Also ratings were kinda a new and less relevant thing I think, but that was long before I was ever born.

    The California culture of risk with enormous funds and technology at the time was also huge and had a big impact on SW that was forging that bleeding edge and melding the old with the new. We’re in an upheaval era of promise right now too, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive and complicated than it was in the 1970’s-1980’s. Even adjusting for inflation there is no comparison between the cost of a silicon chip fab and edge technology between then and now. The price of novel innovation has changed from someone adapting a new idea to someone contracting established firms.

    The old ways cost enormous labor. It is fine and manageable when that cost is normalized across society in the cost of living. It is impossible to return to that paradigm once that normalization is lost. Society would collapse if the necessary changes were made to make mass labor viable at the scales of the past. So, the risk changes and so must the media.



  • It was a paraphrased quote of Lukas himself that said he made the first films for 10 year olds and the second series for 5 year olds. You need to see it from the perspective of someone willing to risk losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in a gamble that is never a sure thing. The artistry is a very minor often overlooked aspect when this kind of money is in play. I’ve had a job spending a couple of million dollars a year where my mistakes could cost a chain of businesses closing and around three dozen jobs. Buying high end bicycles at that scale requires me to completely disconnect my opinion and style biases and become an account first and foremost. People do not take risks to tell stories, they tell stories that follow an interpretation of statistical metrics.

    The targeted movie rating is key to demographic and without a demographic there are no numbers to make a financial argument for the risk. Films are made TO fit, not made AND fit. The risk is never blind.