loobkoob @ loobkoob @kbin.social

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263

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've always found listening to Pink Floyd is enough of a high already, personally!

lemmy.world, maybe, but other instances have far better uptime! I'm on kbin and it's been weeks since I noticed any downtime.

I agree it should perhaps have started off a little higher, but the fine was set so the amount added would double for every day they didn't comply.

• day 1: $50,000
• day 2: +$100,000 ($150,000 total)
• day 3: +$200,000 ($350,000 total - this is what they paid)
• day 4: +$400,000 ($750,000 total)
• ...
• day 7: +$3,200,000 ($6,350,000 total)
• day 14: +$409,600,000 ($819,150,000 total)
• day 28: +$6.7 trillion ($13.4 trillion total)

The day 3 fine wasn't all that bad for them, but it wasn't a fine they could just eat if they delayed as long as they wanted. Definitely not a "cost of doing business" fine, that's for sure.

Don't apologise for digging it up, it's a really good comment! Barbie being an accessory to other people's growth is a brilliant way of framing it that I hadn't considered - I love that!

I also like framing it that, at the beginning of the film, everyone's identity is somewhat defined by Barbie (as a concept - not the character):

• Barbie is obvious - she is just living the "dream" Barbie life and doesn't know anything outside of that. She struggles when she starts to gain humanity because she feels inferior to the other, more accomplished Barbies (doctor Barbie, president Barbie, astronaut Barbie, etc);
• Ken - his entire life revolves around being "and Ken"; He exists to be Barbie's mild love interest, and is basically irrelevant when Barbie's not around;
• The mother is basically clinging onto childhood optimism and better times by playing with Barbie. She's using Barbie as an escape, but she's also warping the concept of Barbie with her depression;
• The daughter is wholly and actively rejecting Barbie (and her and her friends are also references to Bratz - the "anti-Barbie"), to the point where she's overly cynical, tough, bitter, and not empathetic enough.

By the end of the film, I think everyone ends up empowering and being empowered by the ideals of Barbie (the concept) while also rejecting the relationship they had with the concept at the start of the film:

• Barbie learns to be human. She gains empathy. She sees the value in women having roles like doctor, president, astronaut, etc, but realises it shouldn't be an expectation for every woman and that she's not inferior for not having one of those jobs;
• Ken starts his journey of discovering his own identity, rather than just being an extension of/accessory to Barbie;
• The mother and daughter repair their relationship and the mother (we can assume) stops her "depressed Barbie" creations as her life improves.
• The daughter realises some parts of Barbie's message are positives - that it's meant for empowerment rather than to set unrealistic expectations. So in some ways, she embraces the concept of Barbie, which is a rejection of her previous relationship with the concept.

This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I've been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn't have crypto miners built into it, and isn't just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.

I'm all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn't get caught up in these hate bandwagons.

Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.

This is something that Dune handles really well precisely because it writes a lot of the tech out of the setting. "Thinking machines" are gone and banned, guns don't work against shields, lasers are banned because of their (nuclear) interaction with shields. Even communications are largely handled by couriers. The tech is deliberately written to be at a level where it doesn't take convenience or deux ex machina for certain situations to occur.

Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.

I thought Denix Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune handled this incredibly well when Paul and Jessica used sign language to communicate while they were tied up. In the book, that entire section is told through their internal monologues and their expectations of what the other would be thinking, so translating that to sign language for the screen was clever. I'm very curious to see how the internal-monologue-heavy second half of the book will fare, though.

Green Wing. It's a British sitcom set in a hospital. There's absolutely nothing medical-related in it; the hospital is just the place where everyone works - a backdrop and nothing more. It's somewhere between a sketch show, a soap opera and a comedy drama - it's surreal, exaggerated and definitely has a lot of "sketch-like" scenes, but the characters are fleshed out and consistent, and have proper emotional arcs.

It has an absolutely fantastic cast, and a lot of them have gone onto have very successful careers since then. Olivia Coleman, for one, but I'm sure you'll recognise Tamsin Greig, Stephen Mangan, Michelle Gomez and Mark Heap - if not their names then at least their faces.

It has an incredible editing style and score, too. Like, it's impossible not to notice how good they are, even if they're not something you're usually remotely interested in. In particular, it makes heavy use of slow-motion and fast-forward at the start and end of scenes, with the brilliantly catchy score as the only audio, which really highlights the actors' body language as well as making for great transitions between scenes.

It's laugh-out-loud funny, memorable and surprisingly endearing for such a surreal show. I always found it surprising that Black Books - which is also fantastic (and also stars Tamsin Greig) - managed to find an American audience but Green Wing never seemed to. Both are on par with each other, I think.

Yeah, it is daily. Which I personally find better than having to do it all in one go - it just fits into my routine as something I do when I turn my computer on - but I can definitely see the appeal of being able to do it all in one go for some people.

I pay for my Game Pass subscription with them. On average, it probably takes about a minute of interaction per day - I've macro'd the searches, so I'll just leave my computer running the macro for a couple of minutes while I go and get a drink, clean my teeth, etc. Other than that, I just have to click all the links and then immediately close the tabs they open. Some days it takes a little longer because there are quizzes, but they're rarely more than an extra minute.

So overall, I think it's worthwhile for me;. It's probably half an hour of "work" per month to get Game Pass. You can redeem points for other things like Amazon gift cards, too (although obviously they're lower monetary value per point than Microsoft'own products/services).

Stranger Things doubly suffers because it's horror. In the first season, neither the characters or the audience know what's going on. The monsters are new and scary. The concepts are new and scary. The first season is incredible because it's all unknown, and because there's an almost cosmic horror quality to it.

However, by the end of the first season, both the characters and audience are experienced. The monster has been revealed and killed and, while it was tense and scary, the characters and audience know what to expect next time. The upside-down has been revealed and, while there's a lot about the idea left to explore, there's and understanding of what it is, how it works to some degree, how it's linked to the real world, etc. Everyone has knowledge and experience. And with knowledge and experience, the horror dissipates.

So where do they go from there? Well all they can do is to make bigger, scarier concepts or to throw more of the same at the characters. More of the same can make for good action - see Aliens - but the horror element just doesn't work any more, and it loses a sense of intimacy that a single monster brings. So the only way to try to maintain that feeling of horror is to go bigger and scarier.

Of course, the issue of intimacy remains. How do you have a huge, scary monster - far bigger and scarier than the first one - while still keeping it feeling both personal and intimate to our characters and having it feel "beatable"? And, well, you can see how Stranger Things struggled with that in season 2.

Funnily enough, The Boys came to my mind as a negative example. It feels like every season hints at big things coming, but then the finale just kinda resets everything without those big things actually happening. And then the next season starts with them having to get the gang back together again.

I largely enjoyed the most recent season but the finale killed any excitement I might have had for the next season. The finale really avoided resolving anything at all, and basically undid as much as it was possible to undo.

Wait, so what have they done? I love the comics but I've not watched anything of the TV show yet. But the whole appeal of the comics is examining mundane, everyday human things from an alien perspective; I don't understand how they could try to adapt the comics and not do that.

I do both. I have YouTube Premium, but I also use ReVanced because it's just a better app than the standard YouTube one. It has far better options, like removing a lot of the bloat - cough Shorts cough - and many nice quality-of-life features. It feels much more responsive than the standard app for me, too - I'm using an older device and the standard YouTube app can feel pretty sluggish.

I'm not a Sync user (or a Lemmy user, even - I'm on kbin) but something I'd love see in general across the threadiverse is to be able to add some sort of weighting to certain communities/magazines. There are some meme communities that I don't necessarily want to block entirely, but that show up in my feed far too often, and there are some niche communities I wish I could see more from. Having a "weighted all" feed would be fantastic.

About 20 yeses ago - pre-smartphones - my sister lost a phone to water damage. It was in a backpack pocket during a camping/hiking trip and the backpack got rained on a lot. Everyone else's phone was fine because they were kept either in waterproof backpack compartments or in trouser/waterproof coat pockets.

Around the same time, I also had a friend whose phone was broken when we were rafting and the raft capsized. The rest of us on the raft had left our phones at home because why would you risk bringing a mobile phone on a homemade raft?!

Those are the only two instances I know of personally where someone's phone has been destroyed by water damage and it hasn't just been an "oops I dropped it in the toilet" situation (I'm still not sure how people manage that). And even the second example was still due to stupidity, I think - there's a reason the rest of us didn't rake our phones on the raft. My sister's phone being damaged in the backpack is the only one that didn't feel preventable, and where a water resistance phone would genuinely have been a good thing.

In EA's defence, I think that moment was a turning point for them. That's not to say their games since then have been perfect - they certainly haven't, and most of them don't appeal to me anyway - but I think most of the flaws with their games since then have been developer-related issues rather than anything to do with publisher meddling.

Funnily enough, I don't care too much about apps because kbin's mobile web version (and, by extension, its PWA) is pretty nice as is. But I agree that most mobile websites have terrible UX.

I think the majority of "Marvel burnout", for me at least, is on Marvel's side. I still want to enjoy Marvel's releases, it's just that their quality has dropped so much that I can't do that right now. And it's something Marvel has acknowledged, so it's something they'll likely improve on in future projects that haven't entered production yet, at least.

But yeah, I'm personally still in the "I want more good MCU" camp.

I've been finding ChatGPT increasingly useful lately, both because ChatGPT is useful and because Google search feels like it's been in decline.

I'm not a coder. At all. I probably have slightly better understanding than the average non-coder, but looking at code tends to make my eyes glaze over. I'm typically good with the logic of what I want to happen, but the syntax and simply knowing what functions are available are things I really struggle with.

A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a somewhat simple script. I spent several hours trying things, googling for solutions to the problems I encountered, and ultimately I got nowhere. Yesterday, I decided I should give ChatGPT a go. Not only did I get ChatGPT to write the entire script for me, with me just giving it prompts on what I wanted it to do, but it managed to explain pretty much everything it was doing - with answers tailored to my exact code. When things didn't work, it could speculate on why it might not have worked, and try alternative solutions.

It was a fairly collaborative process. There were points where I could see things that ChatGPT hadn't caught, like certain lines of code that had become unnecessary after iterating, or that variables hadn't been defined properly, and I could point then out and it'd fix them.

Using ChatGPT isn't entirely the same as googling for information, but I think you have to take a fairly similar approach with how you use both. Your language has to be precise and clear, you need to have an understanding of what output you want, and how to tailor your input to achieve that output. And you need to understand how to use the output it gives you - sometimes it'll be wrong, or only partial. Sometimes it'll require further steps to get the final result you're looking for.

It's more aesthetically pleasing and rolls off the tongue better than "regurgitated xcrement"