I remember hearing about IT from other kids, and them describing all these horrific things that happen. When I watched it as an adult I couldn’t believe how tame it was. Everything had been exaggerated, and some of it was probably being confused with things from other movies.
The first Mission Impossible movie is a fun time capsule in many ways. It has some fun stuff with early 90s depictions of computers, hacking, the internet and email, back before anyone knew what any of that actually looked like.
But it’s also a great example of the 90s naivete that the US had about conflict and global politics. There’s an entire monologue about how intelligence agencies are obsolete because the cold war is over. There was this vague notion in the 90s that world peace had broken out and things were just going to get better and better. And Hollywood sometimes struggled to come up with villains now that they no longer had soviets for that, so you don’t see it reflected as much in films, especially since optimism doesn’t make for good popcorn flicks, but Mission Impossible captures the thinking if not the warm and fuzzy feeling.
My other suggestion would be Contact. My theory has always been that 2001 A Space Odyssey, Contact, and Interstellar are really the same movie made in different times. As the 90s incarnation, Contact has no international conflict, only internal politics. It’s got that I’m spiritual but not religious" vibe that was everywhere in the 90s. It has a vague message about hope, and belief and trying to understand the universe and what’s out there in order to understand ourselves… it’s hard to put it all in words, it’s just the whole tone and vibe of the thing, it’s all just so sincere and idealistic.
(For a great big dose of 90s optimism and hope for the future, I highly recommend watching the Adventures of Brisco Country JR. I’d have nominated that, but it isn’t a movie)
Ultraviolet. It makes other colors that much more cool just by being there. And it kills things.
It will block youtube ads if the video is embedded in another website. When I want to find a youtube video on my tv I just search it on DuckDucGo, since watching it there blocks ads and seems to bypass any restrictions they’ve placed on watching videos outside of youtube.
I need to set up a cheap computer and just run the TV as a monitor so I can have all the features I want, including a real browser with ublock. But in the meantime, this fixes the one issue I have with DNS level blocking.
I can’t scroll by this post and not mention Dungeon Crawler Carl. Though, it may not fit this thread, seeing as it is a goddamn masterpiece. Particularly the audiobook.
Just what we need, more walled gardens and exclusivity deals. And of course, another way of monetizing your data, because we don’t have enough of that already.
Search results are already fucked enough as it is. We don’t need to start carving up the internet and and dividing it among different search engines.
Ain’t no cowboy gonna ride ol’ spiney.
Ark players: Hold my beer.
I wanna say they specifically called out property destruction as being against the rules. And overpaying as well iirc, so you can’t offer someone millions for a sandwich that you then eat.
Plus, if we’re being pedantic, burning the money isn’t spending it, which is what he is supposed to do.
The movie also has the advantage of having a contract that presumably covers any other loopholes the audience thinks of, but which they don’t explicitly address in the script. Once you take it out of a movie and start treating it like a challenge to be solved, you can no longer hide behind some unseen fine print.
It’s taking the premise of Brewster’s Millions, which required that he not only spend the money, but that he has to have nothing left at the end, including assets. So, buying a house doesn’t work because you still own the house.
Obviously there are still plenty of ways to drop millions on stuff without having anything to show for it. Hell, it’s probably easier now than ever before. Just become a whale for a mobile game and you’re there.
Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.
Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”
What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.
That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.
Don’t worry, it might still bubble up to the surface in the hallucinations of an AI.
Ukraine is a major global food supplier. The war has directly impacted food prices. And if Russia succeeds, it will only encourage more conflict of this kind. And that’s ignoring the possibility that this will escalate into an even larger conflict because Putin decides that NATO’s resolve is weak enough that article 5 is no longer a plausible threat.
Also, that stupid argument applies just as much to funding schools, cancer research, fighting climate change and basically all other functions of government that serve the public good. We should do more to address economic issues, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing everything else.
My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”
Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.
Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.
Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.
It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.
It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.
The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.
Babylon 5.
I rewatch it every few years, this time with the SO who finally caved and decided to watch it with me. Despite having seen the entire series half a dozen times I’m still finding things I never noticed before. And while it’s always been rather timeless, a lot of its themes are so much more applicable now than ever before. Cannot recommend it highly enough.
Other recent rewatches shared with the SO and found to have stood the test of time: Gargoyles, Batman TAS, Brisco County Jr, Daredevil, Star Trek TNG.
Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.
Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.
Jaws was absolutely the first thing I thought of. So many kids suddenly developed a fear of ponds, lakes, and swimming pools because no one stopped and asked themselves if it was a good idea for a small child to watch people get eaten alive.