• 1 Post
  • 80 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • It was better than Crystal Skull because it didn’t quite so explicitly sci-fi the magic, the set pieces were a little better, and Helena was less annoying than Mutt, but both movies are sort of equally useless, and openly depressed Indy was VERY depressing. The character always had some undiagnosed mental health issues pushing him towards unhealthy risk-taking, but Mangold’s Indy just made me sad.



  • I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.

    Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.


  • This all feels a lot like any low- or mid-range CAD suite that gets acquired by Autodesk, Siemens, or PTC. Promise enough to avoid a revolt, but start eroding with the next release.

    The educational licensing for lock-in is also par for the course. It can be done well (Rhino 3D is legendary for letting small-shop designers use their cheap edu license forever, even commercially), but generally it’s just there to maintain the supply of baby drafters and get subscriptions from employers.









  • Is “college town” agreed to be a denigration? I’d take it as a fairly complex descriptor that could be good or bad depending on your situation. I loved living in college towns. I’m not desperate to move back to one, but I could easily see myself retiring in one, and if you want a small town with more cultural and sporting options and a better educated populace than its peers, then putting up with some rowdy undergrads and a quirky mix of available businesses could be a perfectly sensible tradeoff.




  • The Marvels is not bad at all. Better than Iron Man 2 or 3, Thor 2 or 4, Ant-Man 3, Black Panther 2, the Ultron movie, or any standalone Hulk movie (not entirely fair, I know), and equivalent to the “good” Ant-Man movies or GotG 2. It’s also better than Captain Marvel, and Brie Larson is finally making the character her own. Good chemistry among the leads, the switching dynamic is visually interesting, and the entire cast brought in from Ms. Marvel remains endlessly enjoyable. The “need” to have watched everything is there but dramatically overstated in complaints I’ve seen.

    Now, to be fair, the plot is too episodic and disjointed, and the villain is once again an underdeveloped cipher with tantalizingly nuanced motives that aren’t explored, and the movie certainly is more cohesive if you’ve kept up with your homework. Honestly, though, if you watched Captain Marvel and caught the trailer for Ms. Marvel you’d be fine, though again, you’d be missing one of the more delightful (if still a bit uneven) recent Marvel projects.



  • I just watched The Marvels, and I liked it quite a bit, if I stopped short of loving it (but honestly, who LOVES marvel movies? The entire point is high floor/low ceiling entertainment). The plot meanders and it has a typical Marvel “understandable but underdeveloped” villain, but the leads had good chemistry, the switching dynamic was fun, the entire cast from Ms. Marvel is delightful, and Brie Larson is (finally) getting comfortable in the role. I was kinda surprised at how poorly it did, but also kinda not, because fanboys are proving that they really need to see themselves represented or they suddenly develop extremely high standards and demand only groundbreaking entertainment with perfect execution.


  • almost every one of these is sort of set dressing and skin deep, and changed drastically in some fundamental way.

    I think we’re on the same team here, but it would be silly not to view Dune as one inspiration among many. I think Herbert was a being a needlessly salty MFer though. For the second point, I was thinking more the Bene Gesserit than the Fremen, and while “warriors” is maybe stretching things a bit, you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of a reverend mother.



  • Before Center could reply, I’m thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol’ Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He’s the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground. And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done – in mere seconds we’ll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn. Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check? There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground. I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: Ah, Center, much thanks, We’re showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money. For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the HoustonCentervoice, when L.A.came back with: Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one. It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day’s work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast. For just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.