PS5 Slim’s Lack Of Fanfare Speaks Volumes About This Generation
Michael Caine has been acting for as long as I can remember and while it's not surprising he would retire from acting since he's 90, it kind of felt like he would just keep acting forever.
Having said that, I think he's gotten all he can out of acting and I can see why he would want to retire. I guess we'll see in a few years if it was a real retirement or a Miyazaki retirement.
While Afterparty was not my favorite show, I loved watching Sam Richardson on screen and the show seemed to have a lot of fun with itself and its fans. I'm definitely pretty bummed about this news.
It feels like the steaming bubble is finally bursting and studios are realizing they can't support a unique streaming service by throwing money at as many series as they can. The sad thing is that means plenty of smaller shows are being cut regardless of their quality; the studios have just reached a point of tightening their belts. I'm sure the combined writers/ actors strike probably hurt as well (even though it was completely necessary).
I know they say they'll do both; but with finite money, I have to assume some of their art-house pictures will have to be cut. Over time, I would assume if the blockbusters make enough money, I would assume they would scrap even more prestige films for more blockbusters.
This actually reminds me a lot of the "enshittification" cycle. Develop a strong brand at a loss that consumers respect, then lower the quality as much as you can to maximize profits.
As an aside, I wonder how their reputation will affect their ability to produce blockbusters. If you could get your movie made by a larger studio, would you be likely to make it with A24 just because they have a history of prestige films?
In any case, it will be sad to see A24 go this route. Hopefully a new studio is able to fill the void, should A24 move out of the art-house film space.
It's a bit of a long read, but I thought it was interesting what a mess the Marvel production was.
Marvel Studios has always had a tough relationship with TV cough Inhumans cough. I think Agents of SHEILD being their only successful non-Netflix show before launching a plethora of shows on Disney+ (and even that one was a little rough around the edges).
Since launching Disney+, I have personally found the Marvel TV quality to consistently hit C+/B- quality, with occasional highlights (the first half of Wandavision, most of Loki); which surprised me since I felt the movies hit higher quality more consistently.
It makes sense the TV landscape has been hard with Marvel after reading this article, though. Committing to a whole season/ series with no pilot seems risky enough, but combine that with no show-runner and a fix-it-in-post attitude, and it's a shock the shows came out as passable as they did.
It sounds like Disney is planning to change that, but I'm not sure how much I believe that to be honest. It's also worth noting that I only think it's happening because of the recent negotiation with the WGA.
As someone who has always been skeptical of "AI," I definitely hope corporations dial back their enthusiasm on it; but I think its value has never been commercial, but industrial.
"AI" was not designed so consumers could see what it would look like to have Abraham Lincoln fighting a T-Rex without having to pay artists for their time. "AI" was designed so that could happen on a much larger enterprise scale (though it would probably be stock images of technology or happy people using technology instead).
With this in mind, I think "AI" being a money pit won't dissuade corporations since they want the technology to be effective for themselves, they just want consumers to offset costs.
It's a bit of a long read, but I thought it was interesting what a mess the Marvel production was.
Marvel Studios has always had a tough relationship with TV cough Inhumans cough. I think Agents of SHEILD being their only successful non-Netflix show before launching a plethora of shows on Disney+ (and even that one was a little rough around the edges).
Since launching Disney+, I have personally found the Marvel TV quality to consistently hit C+/B- quality, with occasional highlights (the first half of Wandavision, most of Loki); which surprised me since I felt the movies hit higher quality more consistently.
It makes sense the TV landscape has been hard with Marvel after reading this article, though. Committing to a whole season/ series with no pilot seems risky enough, but combine that with no show-runner and a fix-it-in-post attitude, and it's a shock the shows came out as passable as they did.
It sounds like Disney is planning to change that, but I'm not sure how much I believe that to be honest.
Oh, exactly. I've hit a point where I could buy nice clothes on occasion if I had a reason too, but with expensive clothes being just as quality errant as low end brands, I find myself having very little reason to upgrade my wardrobe.
If I could find a reliably quality brand, I'd certainly be more inclined to start changing out my closet.
As it stands right now: I can basically throw out any polyester clothes because I never wear them, even if I like the pattern.
I think a lot of people have noticed clothing quality going down for a while, especially if shopping fast fashion brands; but I thought it was especially interesting how the decline in quality permeated through the high end brands as well.
When I saw the Ben Schwartz photo referenced in the article, I had assumed it looked worse since it was probably not as nice a brand as Billy Crystal's sweater. I was surprised to see it was likely a 400USD sweater that looked like that.
As the article notes at the end, it is still possible to find fully natural clothes, but I wish they were easier to locate.
When it comes to taste in entertainment, there is very little that can be considered objective. I, myself, know several of these shows by reputation as being great but have no interest in watching them. (For example, I've heard Peep Show is phenomenal, but I do not enjoy cringe humor; and I've never been able to get into Game of Thrones.)
Based on what you've watched in the past, I might recommend South Side or Insecure off the list. They're both classic sitcoms with South Side reminding me a lot of Parks and Rec (it is not a mockumentary, though). Insecure feels more like the evolution of spiritual sequel to Girlfriends. Insecure is a little further from your previously watched list than South Side, but they're both pretty solid sitcoms.
I have also heard recommendations for Fleabag and Broad City as comedies but I haven't seen enough of them to confirm if they'd work for you.
In terms of prestige dramas, I've heard great things about I May Destroy You but I have not watched it since I'm not personally huge on dramas.
There definitely seems to be some recency bias in the shows that were picked, and I certainly don't agree with the placement on most of the shows on the list; but I think it goes without saying these are all strong shows.
The shows I was personally happy to see get a shout out were South Side, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Atlanta. Though I was not surprised to see Atlanta get recognized, I was surprised to see the other three get the recognition they deserve.
I never kept up too closely with the Jeopardy situation, but my (limited) understanding was that the EP deliberately set Burton up to fail; giving him only one week (instead of the two weeks that other hosts were given) and making his week during the Olympics.
Only having one week instead of two meant that he was only actually filming for a day or two and likely didn't have a chance to really find his footing. And of course, being during the Olympics hurt his ratings.
Now, were those two issues the some cause of all of his problems? Probably not; but it definitely feels like they were never intending to give him the job.
As you said, though, it all worked out in the end anyways; and I'm hoping it all works out for Roy Wood Jr as well.
I haven't watched The Daily Show in a long time, so I don't have much of a horse in this race; but I could tell a lot of people were really hopeful that Roy Wood Jr would get the host role.
Hearing about the guest host roster and the entire process definitely is reminiscent of when Jeopardy short changed Levar Burton for the host position. It was later revealed to have been a play by the (former) executive producer to give himself the host position; but by the time Jeopardy got its house in order, Levar Burton had already been given his own show to host.
I think a lot of times studios aren't really as in touch with what people want as they think and they can easily overlook a crowd favorite. I'm hoping that similar to the Levar Burton Jeopardy situation, this will reveal Roy Wood Jr's popularity to allow him his own show as well.
While season 3 did not feel as strong as season 2 to me, I'm definitely bummed about this news. It's especially a bummer since they ended on a cliffhanger.
I thought the new additions to the cast (Harper and Millicent) were both great actors and I hope to see them in new projects following iCarly's cancellation.
A couple of key highlights:
The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.
It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.
Under the plan, Meta has told regulators it would charge users roughly €10 a month, equivalent to about $10.50, on desktop on a Facebook or Instagram account, and roughly €6 for each additional linked account, the people said. On mobile devices the price would jump to roughly €13 a month because Meta would factor in commissions charged by Apple’s and Google’s app stores on in-app payments.
Privacy-conscious users in the U.S. shouldn’t expect to be offered the option to pay for ad-free Instagram or Facebook soon. Meta’s proposals have been pitched specifically as a way to navigate demands by EU regulators to seek consent before crunching user data to select highly personalized ads.
It isn’t clear if regulators in Ireland or Brussels will deem the new plan compliant with EU laws, or whether they will insist Meta offer cheaper or even free versions with ads that aren’t personalized based on a user’s digital activity.
This feels like Meta is just attempting to play at Malicious Compliance. There's no way they make that much off each user per month, this feels like they are intentionally making it cost-prohibitive to have the ad-free version just so they can say they are meeting EU regulations. I certainly cannot see many users shelling out ~€17 a month for Instagram and Facebook.
As noted, though, this may not be enough to pass the EU regulations.
I think we all knew this was coming when Nintendo discontinued being able to purchase 3DS and Wii U games on the eShop, but it is still very sad to hear.
Many 3DS and Wii U games have been ported to the Switch over the years, but there will be several games that will likely never get ported because they were incremental series games. Why would they port Super Smash Bros Wii U when they already released Super Smash Bros Ultimate?
A lot of people will probably not care much being on the newest console, with the newest games, but it is truly sad to know that you will never be able to revisit these games again in a few years when you're feeling nostalgic, or if you just like the old version better.
I can only hope that homebrewers figure out how to spoof their own servers to keep online functionally for these old games.
The trick is to make sure you've checked everything else off on your list before getting to that one
I like the idea of bots that can summarize articles since oftentimes articles can have fluff to bump up the word count or help with SEO.
I also find (anecdotally) including an article summary in the body of the post helps increase discussion; since some people don't necessarily want to read the whole article but will read a summary, and can then contribute to the discussion.
The problem with summarizing bots, though, is I have a hard time trusting the bots that do the summarizing.
In my (limited) experience with LLMs, they can understand English well enough, but they have a hard time understanding nuances and context clues. Granted, that shouldn't be an issue for a well written article, but it's enough to give me pause.
In regards to automatic features that might be nice: I think automatically generating and including archive links would be helpful. Even if the link isn't paywalled, I personally like including archive links to prevent link rot in the future; especially since I've seen some articles get modified against the author's will after publishing before.
I suspect it's because they left the tech sector alone for too long and now major damage control is needed.
It seems like laws and politicians are always a little late to the game with regulations on new technology because they don't fully understand a new technology or its implications until it's been on the market for a while.
Unfortunately, that means by the time the technology's implications have been determined, a lot of damage can have already been done.
I think, similarly, politicians were not examining the tech sector closely when it came to acquisitions; but they realize, now, that they let it fester a little too long.
Hopefully the FTC continues to break up any monopoly it can identify (tech or otherwise), but there's certainly a lot of work to be done.
The interesting thing about this to me is it sounds like HYENAS was already very far along (being in an open beta quite recently).
I wonder if SEGA is giving it the Batgirl treatment, where they cancel it just for a tax write-off; or if it had serious structural issues that would have actually been very costly to rectify.
Anecdotally, I find I get better discussions on posts if I include quotes from the article I find particularly relevant or poignant. I also like to comment my own feelings on the article in the comments as well. I don't think the issue was the title of the article necessarily.
In this case, what sections did you wish people were discussing? To me, the section about the exclusives did not feel particularly engaging since the number of exclusives mentioned was actually pretty high since most games on a console trend to be third party.
If there is an argument being made you would like to highlight, I would certainly be interested in seeing it.