When even The Mirror is forced to tell the British boomers that they are shit outta luck, you know it was a garbage claim to begin with.

Dost thou really?

Strong’s Zuckerberg says in the film that “the debate is over”. If it is, The Social Reckoning portrays a world where Meta is on the wrong side of it.

Hey, this might be good!

Exactly. Cinema is for big and bright and loud and social. Anything else can wait, because apart from offering spectacle and community, cinemas are fucking awful if you have a decent TV and a soundbar. Just like we stopped doing lowest-common-denominator melodrama in live theaters once the moving pictures came long, cinemas in the era of bigscreens and streaming will settle into the niches where they provide unique advantages.

I think this one was Cruise trying to prove he is still a thespian, and not just the last relic of the monoculture movie star system. Also, this:

It marked the first film in a new pact with Cruise — the biggest movie star in the world — to make original and franchise films with Warner Bros. Pairing him with Iñárritu, one of only three directors to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars, seemed like a no-brainer.

They definitely over-committed financially on this Temu Kubrick movie (though from what I understand it’s still half-decent), but I think what they’re really banking on is whatever franchise or action fodder they extract from his aging bones and veneers.

If it was produced in the last ten years, is there any real chance it’s not your first option?

That reminds me: Lanterns is really good.

Star Trek Replicator Chicken fingers. It looks perfect and is always the same, but it’s the type of place where somebody probably got thrown out of a window for suggesting that a pinch of black pepper be put into the recipe. The sauce is pretty decent, but I hope you like it because it’s utterly necessary. Good lemonade too. Founder leans right, but not “Cathy-family” right.

If you live somewhere with a Layne’s Chicken, that’s way better. Popeye’s is generally better too, though it’s traditional fast food grimy versus “pretend we’re fast-casual” veneer that a lot of the chicken places like to do.

IIRC, other Rosalyn arcs reveal she’s already well above market rate. $5 may have just been the marginal bump for this specific indignity.

That happened in the Sunday strips more and more as time went on. There’d usually be some funny and absurd stuff distributed throughout, but Watterson stopped giving a shit about setup-punchline on Sundays once he strong-armed the syndicate into giving him promises that whatever size a given paper published them at, nobody could alter his layout or trim the area that was traditionally the top row. Instead, he’d draw what he wanted, and it was generally glorious, but kid-me did sometimes want some bigger guffaws.

EDIT: I can see from the date and layout that we weren’t even there yet. Technically a paper could drop the top row and not lose the flow of the strip, and everything is still spaced out “normally.” He was already over it from a writing perspective though.

Twist: poster is AB+

How interesting and cool. I mean, I can have certainly have experiences that flood over me without being articulated, and I can sort of stop talking to myself for a while and I don’t lose the ability to function or anything, but it really cannot last more than a few minutes. Processing the world is deeply tied to language for me.

Obviously, so many more self-aware mammals don’t have language than do, but I’m with you in the sense that I have no idea how you would turn it off or any real conception of what it would be like to go even an hour without it.

I like to think I actually have a pretty decent ability to visualize things, but one other thing that may be related is I also don’t read as quickly as I would like. Upon asking my wife, who digests anything she’s interested in at lightning speed, she informed me that she doesn’t mentally articulate every word. She scans the information visually, still in order but without a detour through her speech center, and retention is excellent. Our daughter seems to do the same thing. Meanwhile, I’m here feeling like I’ve got shit on lockdown because at least I don’t have to whisper the words to myself like some early medieval monk (to the extent that trope is even true… thanks for nothin’, Augustine). If I quickly recite some meaningless mantra in my mind over and over again, I can speed things up for a little while, but it feels deeply unnatural.

I know the guys sold out, technically, but man they had to be laughing their asses off at the very idea that somebody paid good money to redo the spongemonkeys for a sandwich commercial.

Jeez, That is a huge budget for an Oscarbait knockoff Dr. Strangelove that hides Tom Cruise behind heavy makeup.

Oof, I actually guessed around 72, which is of course the huge problem with getting work done that tries to actively fight an aging appearance instead of doing subtler stuff and only trying to stay 10-12 years ahead of it. Eventually you look so odd that people just assume some number that may well be older than actually are.

Of course, there’s a 30 Rock for this…

lol @ “Children McNuggets”

Last night, I was oversharing about some of my plans to make our game room work better as a temporary media room with the Chinese Android projector (not on the internet except for 15 minutes to update its firmware… at least Roku and FAANG don’t run actual botnets, best I can tell).

My AuDHD daughter, who is currently obsessed with Youtube “Object Shows,” though with a lingering long tail of Vocaloid J-Pop, told me, “I don’t know how you ended up talking about this, but it’s probably the same reason I talk about my things.”

Love that kid.

Termination Shock is probably the Stephenson that is most like Reamde in the sense of feeling like a limited scope thriller while still touching on insane big picture stuff. Unfortunately, it does indulge in Neal’s ethos of “megaengineering projects will be a net positive if we just get out of the visionaries’ way”.

Also,

Yeah, Force Majeure’s other name is an “act of god” clause. Something like the Cuban Revolution or other truly significant regulatory upheaval might qualify, a human-made force majeure event in the same way that a war is human-made, but this is going to be a huge stretch, verging on bad faith. Oracle just doing Oracle things, I suppose.

As I understand it, New Mexico is basically just saying, “make sure you account for water and electricity use.” The developer’s lawyers are going to have a very doable task to show that pushback on unfettered datacenter expansion was a foreseeable business risk. I think this is mostly a cynical tactic to renegotiate early in case the RPOs from OpenAI don’t materialize.

I’ve soured a bit on Ed Zitron as he’s clearly making a brand out of how confidently he’s asserting that the bubble will pop any day now, but I do think he’s zeroed in on some of the bizarre developments in the business world that will eventually result in said pop. Ed’s fun for venting, but Cory Doctorow seems to have a slightly more measured take. It certainly vibes with my doomer sentiments, but also doesn’t feel like the preaching is the product.