You forgot the additional $3000 and five years to do enough projects to gain the skills to make a table your loved ones will allow in the house. 🤣
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 15th, 2024
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4·7 days agoProbably? Maybe? Just thought it was worth rolling out the adjective since it was comparing to the before-times. :-)
Also make it 2005 again so people can’t get a 50" widescreen TV for two hundred bucks.
We brought in massive burritos and drinks from a local Mexican restaurant and enjoyed ourselves. Don’t bring loud, smelly, or messy food and there s literally zero problem.
Pick one, LOL.
I’m not even all that picky. Two or three trailers and a couple of ads, I get it. The butts are in the seat and it’s pollyannaish to assume the suits won’t leverage that. Sometimes I even see a trailer for an interesting-looking movie that I didn’t know was in the pipeline. It’s just such a beatdown the longer it goes, and by that I mean the literal time commitment, yes, but also the sense of the social contract being violated, the tonal whiplash, and the clear diminishing returns on picking their audience demographics.
5·8 days agoNow the real questions are how long did it take, and which direction did you go? What if you did all this and it turns out you only ran 2.499 km?!?!?!?! Eratosthenes is looking at you disapprovingly.
I saw Project Hail Mary recently, and while I leveraged my assigned seat to show up at the listed time – even though as a kid I developed the instinct that you need to be at a movie early – I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust the conventional wisdom as to how long the previews and ads would go on after that.
I need to get over it. It was something like 28 minutes, and made the entire experience less fun than it should have been. I’m seeing Dune in the theaters, and maybe the Mandolorian movie if the reviews are decent (I’m still a sucker for Star Wars. Is what it is.). If I get to three in a single year, that will actually be a new high for me in the last 10-20 years.
Everything else is fine at home. We have a pretty big TV and a sound bar, and for all but about 1-3 visual and communal experiences per year, that is all I need. I remember when we were living large with a 32" CRT and stereo speakers that faced forward, so I still feel special watching on a “bigscreen,” and the kids these days (LOL… I’m old) all spend most of their time staring at screens from 5-11", so a movie on the big old TV is already a special treat.
My comment history is littered with this idea, but cinemas are settling into their best use case when they can’t benefit from a captive audience. They are there for big events and film devotees, but everyone who went to the theater because it’s the only place where you could see a movie on a half-decent setup will find other options. It’s not entirely unlike live theater before it, and all the grousing from auteurs will not change it. I’m not even saying they’re wrong, just that they benefited from the fact that they the artform they love had built-in technical and economic advantages that gave them a false idea about how invested the broader audience was in the nuances of their work.
2·9 days agoIn addition to FecEx and Dominos, there’s other restaurants, Amazon, UPS, newer Chinese-owned final-mile carriers, Uber including Eats/Pets/Courier/etc., Lyft, Doordash, medical couriers, legal couriers, etc. etc. It’s tougher outside the cities, and it’s all kind of a neo-Victorian dystopia of poor wages and no support, but if what’s you actually want to do, “driving places cuz other people can’t or won’t” is a very doable job-description in the US. Just make sure you’re factoring in car expenses if you do the gig-based ones.
20·11 days agoWell, spam, egg, sausage, and spam – that’s not got much spam in it.
I don’t know if it’s really necessary at this point, but I’ll put it behind a spoiler tag…
spoiler
For me, just the simple fact that there was an interpersonal dynamic at all helped quite a bit. Grace had someone to look after him and to look after in the moment made the emotional connection more real for me. I also appreciated that there was a deeply optimistic take on first contact that Hollywood doesn’t seem to love, so we had some power of friendship vibes.
Now all that said, I also think that the book PHM was a pretty serious course correction for Weir as a writer. The Martian was his first novel, and while enough of it is compelling to make it “good,” it’s very clearly that: a first novel. The plot is meandering and episodic. Watney is a clear author-insert and is literally the only character who gets even nominal treatment as an actual human being. Fortunately he’s wry and and engaging and brilliant and gets to do science adventures that don’t insult an informed audience, and the info dumps are good reading.
Artemis was pretty clearly a failure, I think mostly because Weir and/or his team needed to show that book two was going to be more sophisticated, but unfortunately while Weir kind of knew what he needed to do – full cast of characters, actual plot with antagonists, lead who isn’t the result of
Ctrl-H Andy to Mark– he doesn’t pull it off. The result is a lead he can’t sell to the audience, a plot that ends up kind of boring because it has to adhere to his view of what the science will permit with minimal fudging, and while the supporting cast is not the wet tissue of The Martian’s, they’re still paper.Project Hail Mary dials back the number of characters from Artemis, immediately kills off the annoying “other astronauts” who might compete for mindspace, and also gives us a world in crisis where only the emotionally unencumbered nerds can save us, and so it’s okay that most of the humans are that. Grace, who frankly could have been Mark Watney without messing things up too much (and indeed his reluctance to go on a lonely space mission might even make sense), does get more flaws and internal conflict than Watney and is a more well-rounded author insert. However, Weir succeeds in doubling the number of characters we care about by having Rocky there to be the sounding board that allows Grace to reflect and grow and have someone with whom he can connect, since it didn’t work out with literally any human on Earth, with the device of the limited communication allowing Weir to distill emotions down to their accessible cores. Divorced from the “science fuck yeah!”, it’s just a step in the right direction as a storyteller, while still not nearly as ambitious as Artemis (and therefore snowflake Weir doesn’t get his fee-fees hurt by the queer Star Trek fans).
To circle back to the film, though, because of that, I think they made a slightly less interesting movie, because it’s still Weir, and the main thing he does well is turning science and infodumps into dramatic tales. The hollywood team made Rocky iconic, though. That part wasn’t exactly how it all was in my mind’s eye, but pretty close and also adorable.
I made my semi-annual trip to the theatre and saw Project Hail Mary, despite Weir making an ass of himself. It was very good, and much better emotionally than The Martian, but I think that earlier one nailed the “I’ma science the shit out of this” vibe a little closer to Weir’s writing.
2·18 days agoIt hasn’t been plugged in for the better part of a decade, back when we had a house with a floor lamp plug right by it, but it theoretically has a mini fridge, charging, and a Bluetooth speaker. In use, it has one very big drawer to go with two normal drawers.
Very similar, but it’s from some brand called Sobro, it’s a little smaller, and only 2/3 of it is a mini fridge.
It hasn’t been plugged in for over six years.
Heelers love us very much, but they also believe they know best and our suggestions like “Don’t bite my face” or “Don’t get chest deep in mud” are the barely coherent babblings of beloved children with low intelligence.
The heeler will decide what is best. Mud is best.
He doesn’t generally lie with his tummy to the sky out there. He prefers to let the black fur soak it up like a solar panel. He has a “saddle” pattern like a german shepherd.
Houston the baked pit-tato says, DID WE JUST BECOME BEST FRIENDS!?
33·25 days agoI mean, why else do we think this was the final straw?
I agree with the general takes here, and can add one for specific situations. I have some very old keyboards, and frankly even my newer ones rely on designs that are over 40 years old. In this particular case, I find the old tech superior, because they simply feel nicer to type on, and that’s what a keyboard is for.
I also have quite a few fountain pens, but whereas with a little effort the keyboards are as good or better than an average modern model, I’ll admit there is a fussiness and mess with fountain pens you have to weigh against the nicer writing experience.
33·28 days agoGood for the recall folks, though I’m sure there’s a share of pure NIMBYs in there and some folks definitely having the day they voted for. That’s funny that the supporters think the 1000 construction jobs will be for locals and not the specialized oilfield-like firms that are already staffed up to work these projects, or that Google will have 200 permanent staffers tied to the location and contributing to the town’s tax base.
A seagull is better-read and more charming, though.