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.

Yup! And honestly, most illegal things you might do accidentally are not spur of the moment situations, and frankly even in an imperfect system you’re unlikely to get the book thrown at you right away. There are abuses, of course, and stamping them out is an absolutely laudable goal, but if you want to set up a business, or think you’ve discovered a novel financial instrument, or (hypothetically of course) wanted to train an LLM algorithm on the totality of an absolutely vast corpus of information without the rights-holders’ consent, then if you can’t be arsed to get legal clarity in advance I have less sympathy for you and you’ve earned your consequences.

Theater lobby vs streaming lobby. YAY!

Frankly, as long as they stop memory-holing completed projects like Zaslav did, it will be at least a modest improvement.

I believe it’s a dedicated parking garage, which admittedly only helps a little.

Yup, but it also might be lightly photoshopped. The Street View has a window right where the portajohn is sitting that looks pretty permanent, but this pic or the street view could be old.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

Or, you think you lost one and get the second, but the original was tucked into some zippered sub-pouch all along.

Only if they get James Gunn to do it, and only if they can find something eye-shaped to graphically pierce.

belaboring every little plot point to connect up to four

That would be one of the “new ones” I was thinking of, and they didn’t even do it well. Leia remembers her real mother, explicitly in the script, so Lucas just says, “nah… it’d feel cooler if she died in childbirth.” Make the nerds hand-wave something about the Force until I can rewrite and re-film Ep6.

I believe the best guesses place it somewhere between Worcestershire and Vietnamese fish sauce, but I guyess it was so ubiquitous it would have varied widely.

Prequels were trash, but 3 was the worst of them.

TWO was the worst of them, IMHO, but you deserve credit for realizing that 3 is overrated and a saber battle with lava and a bunch of good guys dying just makes it dark, not good. It has every issue that 1 and 2 do, and adds a few new ones.

Dial back Jar Jar, age Anakin up 5 years, and accept that Liam Neeson is the lead, and you’ve got a halfway decent Star War.

Q: Why did Qui-Gon lose to Maul?

A: He was tired from carrying the whole movie.

Yes, but regardless, the real LucasArts Outlaws is on GoG.

OH MARRRRSHALLLLLLLL!!!

I like Rogue One, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why people love Rogue One. It’s a decent enough Dirty Dozen riff in a Star Wars Skin Suit, but it has terrible pacing, a story that didn’t particularly need to be told, unengaging leads (rewatch after Andor helps some but not entirely), and too much fan service. It’s nice that it allows some whisps of moral ambiguity into the Rebellion, and it’s absolutely saved by the climactic battle, but I do not get the universal and enthusiastic acclaim.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Episode 8 is better.