From a Doylist/marketing perspective, though, I honestly think most people gave the novel a chance because Andy Weir made a name for himself with The Martian. In Sci-Fi publishing, he’s the brand, so the publishers can indulge a surprise plot point. For a mainstream movie, “from the author of that one Mars movie that didn’t suck and did quite well ten years ago…” doesn’t really move the needle, but "Ryan Gosling is a…

Well, that just might.

This comic has always resonated with me. THIS is how we incorrigible know-it-alls of the world can use our powers for good, or at least for not actively evil, LOL.

This. I’d say it’s perfect for people who don’t want to tinker at all, and it’s excellent for experts who either know or will enjoy learning how to make its containerization/sandboxing/whatever approaches work out. “Tinkering” is the specific doughnut hole where it is a problem. I replaced it with Tuxedo OS because I was frustrated with trying to set up the toolset for the QMK keyboard firmware, and it turned out there’s a whole layer of things you have to do to make it work, and some of the simpler ones simply break the immutability. A few other tools I wanted to use were running into similar hurdles.

NOw, it’s not that I beleive any of this stuff was a showstopper for everyone; I have too much confidence in the community for that. I am just old and dumb and while I love using Linux, I don’t necessarily want Linux itself to be my hobby. Now all that said, my Minecraft and Starfield installs were working really well on Bazzite, and I haven’t done any gaming in recent weeks so I hope they’ll be as good on Tuxedo.

That’s about right. Our cockatiel is a little ham, and our blue Budgie (RIP, Ozzie) had “I have no fucking time for this” energy.

We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.

Chocolate and cinnamon creme, to read the image. I reckon the goal is for it to taste a bit like Mexican Hot Chocolate, which is generally delicious.

The lyrics are out of order though. The original starts in about 1949 and moves roughly forward in time, never backtracking by more than a year or two. The FOB lyrics are all over the place from the start:

• Captain Planet 1990
• Arab Spring 2010
• LA Riots and Rodney King 1991
• Deep Fakes 2015ish as a media thing?
• Earthquakes without more context? Lame!
• Iceland volcano, probably the 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull

It drives me nuts that this is not roughly in chronological order like the original. Makes it feel half baked and way less impressive. That said, Billy Joel’s chorus feels like some serious Boomer deflection these days.

It’s interesting. Pixar was kind of custom-made for Rotten Tomatoes, because even past their glory days, most of what they make is universally deemed to be decent or better, therefore they kill it on the tomatometer. Looks like this one is just “nice,” but pretty much everyone agrees it’s nice, LOL.

Okay… maybe one king…

Thanks. Yeah, I don’t know what all the hullabaloo about “a different movie” would be then. Maybe a pristine print hits a little different and reveals details that make it feel more like what it is, but I tend to agree this is just people with unrealistic expectations of the movie that basically started modern VFX.

Since you seem to be informed, I have a potential Mandela effect to discuss. I have a distinct recollection of seeing multiple pre-SE versions on TV and/or VHS, but the only difference I remember is that one of them included a few seconds of Threepio explaining the contents of the plans/maps Artoo was downloading in the initial guard room they take over. The dialogue sounded distinctly and sloppily ADR’d. Have you ever heard of anything like that?

He was also really good on his episode of Derry Girls. If this movie isn’t funny, I don’t think it’ll be his fault.

It’s really hard to tell from the article just how different it is. You’ve got Kathy Kennedy saying “I’m not even sure there’s another one quite like it… It’s that rare.” But then you’ve got them talking like it’s exactly what anyone who watched the film from 1977-1980 would have seen. Maybe it’s just that the print quality was rare in light of George’s occasional purges?

The headline also oversells how “bad” it was. This from the article (with adequate context) felt more on point:

“I felt like I was watching a completely different film,” wrote Robbie Collin, who called the print a “joyously craggy, grubby, stolidly carpentered spectacle” that “looks more like fancy dress than grand sci-fi epic.” “Every scene had the visceral sense of watching actual people photographed doing actual things with sets and props that had been physically sawn and glued into place. The slapstick between C-3PO and R2-D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.”

To the extent it’s relevant, Mr. Collin is also juuust young enough (born 82 or 83) to have missed all three OT films in their original run. For the record, I saw ROTJ first-run as a little kid and it remains the one for which I am the most irrationally protective. This would be as opposed to The Last Jedi, which is the one for which I am the most defensibly and objectively protective. Pardon me while I retrieve my asbestos suit.

Sorry, but those are clearly moth eggs.

Corb Lund is great, and that album is one of his best.

I just wiped Bazzite in favor of Tuxedo OS. I liked Bazzite a lot until I wanted to do the faintest wisp of development (setting up a new DIY keyboard with QMK). At that point I realized I’m in a very specific doughnut hole where I will occasionally want to do things that are still not mindlessly simple on an immutable distro, but I’m still untutored enough to need the walkthroughs that never include how to properly layer or sandbox stuff without just fucking up the very immutability that made it a good idea in the first place.

Shame though, as it was dead easy to install and use for basic productivity and especially games. A person with different needs and/or more skill would do very well with it. In the meantime, Tuxedo seems like a good snap-free Kubuntu alternative, and I’ve been floating around in KDE-running Debian derivatives (off and on) for decades.

I also like the bonkers phase between the “just take a gun with you” era and the synchronizing gears. Seems to have boiled down to three or four ideas:

1. Pusher prop and/or an extra 150 pounds of human to work a turret.
2. Hope you don’t completely destroy your propeller before you defeat or fend off your opponent.
3. Slap some armor on it, then proceed with plan #2 with somewhat more hope, though now with the possibility of richochets.
4. Mount a bizarre triangle thing to the back of it that will deflect the bullets in a somewhat less suicidal manner than simple metal plates.

Dagwood’s got a pretty nice table saw, though Mrs. Mullican needs to use the fence and a fuckin push-stick.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

If anybody’s wondering… (Youtube link)

Also, ooof. Not that this looks to be a fine piece of cinema, but the writer didn’t put this into the script, the director did. Apparently it’s an 1884 printing of an 1853 edition of a 1720 translation (Pope’s), so in no way whatsoever is it first edition of, well, anything. Maybe the worst part of it is that there was absolutely no reason to linger over the title. They never even say the name of the book.