@mattwoahyeah: I know exactly what you mean. A lot of games these days alone wouldn't generate the motivation necessary to actually bother finishing them without help from the fact that my SSDs are too small.
That's a nice-looking keyboard. We need a numpad option though, even if it's separate. The $99 price is good too, but they should have increased it by $20 and added swappable switches. Not having that in 2023 is a standout omission.
Valhalla is arguably the most comically boring AAA ever made. A job that costs you money. A certified chore. The ridiculous conclusion of a misguided principle carried to excess. As interactive entertainment, a failure in almost every way imaginable. A traversal simulator to a degree that puts Dear Esther and Euro Truck Sim to shame. A true test of just how empty a game can be before the general population will admit it. I challenge anyone to even sit through a speedrun of it on YouTube.
I want everyone to keep in mind that in one of the scenes in this movie, Barbie just so happens to be standing in front of a world map, and the visible part of the map just so happens to feature east Asia, and the map showing the China region just so happens to feature the “nine-dash line”.
The nine-dash line is an ancient scribble found on an ancient Chinese-made map, that claims the entire sea, even up to ~1,000 miles away, as China's, and is still being used in 2023 to deny fishing and maritime passage rights to a whole host of countries notably including the Philippines and Vietnam. It's the equivalent of me taking a photograph of your house in 1950, drawing a circle around it, then showing up at your door, photo in hand, to move in and kick you out.
When confronted with this scene in the movie, Warner Brothers' opted for the classy route, the gaslight, paraphrasing, “Jeezz, dude, it's just, like, a movie man, lighten up, it's a cartoon movie bro, about like plastic dolls man, you need to calm down bro, it's just a toy man, you're acting all crazy dude, I think someone needs to chill out a little.”
So despite the fact you really have to go out of your way to find a NDL map, I'm sure it was all just a big misunderstanding and the fact that the movie is raking in cash in China with CCP support, —the #1 enemy of the western world and personal freedom in general— while undermining sovereignty of all the smaller surrounding countries it's bullying, is nothing more than a coincidence.
@sol_01: Him having smart people working for him says nothing of his intellect, (but is positively correlated with intellect). His family having money says nothing of his intellect, (but is positively correlated with intellect). His lack of social skill says nothing of his intellect, (but is positively correlated with intellect). You made up your mind on this guy when you reached the conclusion you liked. He did not simply “spend daddy's money”. He's the only person in US history to start two completely separate multi-billion-dollar enterprises. And he's the only person to become a household name in automobiles, in like, I don't even know how long. At least a generation. How many other billionaires like cars? Basically all of them. But they didn't do what he did. And he wasn't richest in the world back then.
He's a social outcast whose incredible mind made him the richest man in the world, and now he has no social skill but is desperate to be loved. That's why he bought Twitter. A mix of wanting to own the place all the cool people go, and wanting to show off to those same people. (Plus a bit of frustration at the left-wing bias). All you have to do is listen to him speak face-to-face in some long-form format, to see how intelligent he is.
@sol_01: Elon Musk is actually a genius, or something close to it, but that doesn't mean he understands people, which is fine most of the time, but not when you're running a social media company.
“The new A24 horror movie delivers without relying on jumpscares or devastating you emotionally.” I haven't watched this movie, but I just wanted to say that this is a trend I've noticed with modern horrors. Everyone's known about the cheapness of jumpscares since forever, but this trend of “devastating you emotionally” is a relatively new-wave thing, which seems to do very well critically, but which I personally think is almost as cheap and lazy as the jumpscare.
I was the only one who didn't like Hereditary, for example. It was well acted, and relatively well written, but if you actually pay attention to what's going on, it's not a very tight story, and in many instances, isn't consistent, or sometimes doesn't even make sense. It's part of the new trend of horror that I don't think scares you precisely... It's more like it just wears you down with catastrophe after catastrophe, without a break, the entire run-time, until you can hardly breathe with stress. For example, in a typical horror film, you'd never try to pass off an allergic reaction as horror, or the resulting fatal car accident, or the resulting mother's grief, or the resulting animosity created within the family. But that's exactly the tone these films are going for. They take every aspect of a random person's life, and just torture them with something like bad luck, until they're in actual hell.
It's something more like cosmic horror mixed with everyday nihilism, but in my opinion anyway, it doesn't make for very tight or satisfying films.
I've been following the whole Twitter affair since before the deal last year, and in regards to the myriad chages made I've thought, “Yeah good”, “That's fine”, “That's not what I'd do, but OK”, “That'll piss some people off but they'll stay”,
but the move to rebrand Twitter to “X”... well... this is the first time it's felt to me like Twitter may actually die.
First because “X” is a really bad name. Musk tries to squeeze a reminder of the word “sex” into everything he does, because it does in fact make things sell better (I'm ashamed as a human to say...) but just “X” is too generic, while at the same time trying too hard to be cool. People will feel stupid saying it. It's vaguely embarrassing. It's the same reason Zuckerberg called his app “Threads” and not “Threadz”. I'm not even sure if you can trademark it because it's so short, and that same aspect is going to make web searches a lot less accurate too. Twitter and especially “tweets” is literally the reason that Twitter became the dominant platform. Never underestimate a name. It was cool in a charming, flight-of-fancy kind of way. People loved saying it. If people don't like saying your product name, they won't say it, and if they don't say it, they won't use it, and then you're dead. I believe it's the main reason the “Quibi” project died faster than a kamikaze pilot.
Second because people don't like “everything apps”. The chances that it'll be good at everything it does are slim to none, and even if it is, if you make everyone use the same interface for everything, a lot of people will get sick of it really quickly. Everyone using one thing is just not the western way. Something about the idea rubs us the wrong way, almost regardless of what it is. An everything app only really exists in China in the form of WeChat, and the reminders of that will flow in thick and fast from the media when X arrives, particularly from Musk's enemies, which seems like just about everyone at this point.
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