I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.

Wrinkled Eggs

These eggs appear to have ridges or wrinkled surfaces. Overcrowding, which results in stressed hens, can cause this abnormality. It also can be seen when a hen’s shell gland is defective or if the flock has infectious bronchitis. Wrinkles can result in weakened shells. Based on USDA standards for exterior eggshell quality, a wrinkled egg is downgraded to Grade B.

https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/C1255/a-dozen-egg-abnormalities-how-they-affect-egg-quality/

LOL.

…The general manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe has claimed the corporation cancelled future screenings of Brett Ratner’s authorised study of the first lady after being alerted to promotional pushes such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania” and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!..”

…Perry wrote that his overriding instinct was that the programming “would be funny”. There was also a financial imperative, he added: “The film marketplace this week and next were a desert … So, to fill a screen, why not get this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife? I mean, it just seems so weird that it even exists (who wants a movie about Melania lol?), and wouldn’t it then be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show it here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighbourhood cinema?”

Sweet tea, at least proper sweet tea, isn’t really about the tea. The tea is just there to add some color and a subtle note to make it caramel water instead of sugar water. It’s pure diabeetus juice, but it knows what it is. Like many methodical killers, it has a clarity of purpose that can be acknowledged and respected.

The real question is why are you punishing yourself by drinking unsweetened iced tea? That’s just cold dishwater that no one respects.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I think it really hit a family-pleasing sweet spot where it’s some kids’ favorite, including more boys that one might assume because stabby-stabby, but generally it’s a pretty good “introductory text” for exploring intergenerational conflict, self-acceptance, and squaring the circle of conformity vs individualism. The visuals are very of the moment and professionally done; it reminds me a tiny bit of the spider-verse movies in that sense. It’s all done well enough for most parents to tolerate replays. Then the songs are legitimately very catchy and sort of took over the role of the “summer jam” this year, prompting yet more rewatches, and finally Netflix in general has leaned into a lot of Korean media, meaning that aspect, watered down though it may be, probably helped with global popularity.

I dunno, kind of like some of the second- and third-tier Pixar and mainline Disney stuff, it’s not that it’s great, but a huge number of potential audience members collectively agreed it was very good. You can certainly argue it’s not even as good as that, but it did the numbers it did, even faced with the fact that it launched sort of semi-quietly, to the point where they had no merch ready for months and had to slap together the singalong to get it a quick theatrical run.

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

Obviously not all of it, but I would just about bet that it’s at least 75% of this thing will be set on Earth. This is almost always a logistic/budget compromise move when a franchise is normally high-fantasy and/or space-based.

Either that, or the filmmakers don’t believe in the property, which is even worse. Despite Jo being a hack and an awful person, Harry Potter grabbed people’s imagination because it was built around being low-fantasy with Harry serving as an audience insert. The Matrix inverted the trope, but narratively it worked on the same idea. He-Man, IIRC, has some winks and nods to Earth existing, but it’s basically high-fantasy, where Eternia and its galaxy are the universe. OG Star Wars, among others, is the model for how you structure something similarly without bailing on your high-fantasy setting. You need you naive hero to refuse the guide’s call to action until they have been taught lessons about the broader world, possibly by flambeing their aunt and uncle, but you can do it by starting in a corner of the setting that’s more prosaic and “down to earth” without literally being Earth.

This one feels like they wanted Minecraft kitsch, callbacks to the Dolph Lundgren movie, lifting story beats from She-Ra, and limiting how much of the world they had to build/dress/animate, particularly sets and extras. All this for a second- or third-tier memberberries property. I could be wrong, but I think it’s going to land with a thud.

Pretty sure the one with the racing bumper is the real deal.

I’m inclined to agree on that one. No “AI sheen,” no impossible parts, text that makes sense, the bumper matches the car behind the forklift.

I like the one with the long shocks monster truck style

Which is AI generated (from a Sora video) as well. There’s also at least one photoshop and the lego one is just a close-up of a (very nice) lego model.

Maybe it’s monk seal!

Completely tangentially, Troll Hunters and its spinoffs were pretty good.

Jolanta Lasota, the chief executive of Ambitious about Autism, said: “Theoretically any Barbie can be reimagined as autistic, because autism doesn’t have one look. But representation is powerful and Barbie is an iconic toy, so we hope many autistic children feel pride at seeing some of their experiences reflected in this new doll.

Per the article, they tweaked the eyes so they look away slightly, made sure to use one of their fully articulated sculpts so she can move her arms to allow role-play of stimming, dressed her in clothes that would be loose and comfy, and gave her a fidget spinner, noise-canceling headphones, and augmentive-communication tablet.

To a certain extent, every Barbie is a cash grab, but this doesn’t seem any worse than average, and not every family is going to take it as their mission to rise above every consumerist influence in their lives.

True, but you’ve gotta really want that Philippa Gregory book…

I think it was locked. To my shame, I didn’t check. There were about four of them flanking the elevators, so the intention seemed to be decoration.

The selection of items seems weaker to me, but for me the main sin is that the original is basically chronological, which makes it more impressive that it’s a coherent song at all, if a bit overrated and very boomerific. Fallout Boy one just throws shit in at random to make the lines scan and rhyme, so it’s very “meh” even as a follow-up. It feels like they kind of didn’t understand that the original was a survey of the time period.

IIRC, the particular means of installing Elagabalus involved carting the giant abstract/natural monolithic avatar of the god from Syria to Rome, at great expense. I also recall a poorly documented tradition suggesting the Palmyrenes were descendants of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, by way of the Mauretanian client-kingdom dynasty.

Yeah, it felt like a very flat take on the material. Like, Odysseus is an archetypal trickster figure, he’s supposed to be something of a smirking shit (Ulysses Everett McGill?), at least from time to time, and one who creates as many problems for himself as he solves by thinking he’s the smartest guy at the agora. This trailer just looks like The Revenant meets 300. Hope the actual movie is much better.

Teen me had my mind blown when, after finding this song super catchy, I read the lyrics in the liner notes.