• 0 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • I put off watching that for a long time because I didn’t really like the Harley Quinn character and her obsession with Joker and that whole abusive relationship they had, compounded by all the people who treated Harley and Joker like it was a relationship goal.

    But I was very pleasantly surprised when I did eventually give it a shot. Yeah, it does include some Harley and J stuff, but they kinda had to because of how ingrained that relationship was into Harley’s pop culture identity. But it is done well. The series is one of my favorite in the Batman mythos.

    It’s also kinda interesting how Ivy seems to be holding up better morally than Batman himself does. She’s an environmental warrior while he’s a status quo warrior, and that billionaire side of him holds up less and less well as it becomes more and more apparent that even billionaire philanthropists are really just taking credit for giving away wealth they shouldn’t have had in the first place.


  • His reaction might have made it into the top 5 reactions to the shots as far as severity of results. The only other reactions that weren’t just words that I’m aware of are the SS eventually noticing and shooting the guy (plus increasing security), the one cop that shot the guy’s gun, and maybe Trump himself getting PTSD. So Jack Black might have had the 4th most severe reaction by cancelling that tour and rethinking any future collaborations.

    Hindsight is 20/20 but he probably should have just cancelled a show or two and then would have seen that the whole thing was dropped because it wasn’t generating any sympathy for Trump (quite the opposite, the main sentiments I saw were “sucks he missed” and “we really shouldn’t say that it sucks he missed, even though a lot of us are thinking that”).





  • Not just any time it’s copied or generally over time, but each playback can degrade the quality. Record pins erode the channels, magnetic heads affect the strength of the magnetic field they read.

    Reads, copies, and time don’t (necessarily) degrade digital media, even with lossy compression (time can, but any time it’s copied, it resets the clock to as good as the media can give; analog doesn’t get that reset). Lossy compression only degrades it on conversion and there’s a bunch of control over the shape of that degradation (with the intent of it not being detectable to our ears, though it obviously also depends on the bandwidth available).


  • It doesn’t have to be a pleasant aesthetic or visual. It could be anything from a full image to a font used on a resume to the choice of words used in general to the way the email address sounds if you pronounce it out loud. It can be the sequence of smells, sounds, sights, taste, and feel of a single course or five course meal.

    It can be puppets designed to last generations or an explosion that exists for a brief moment.

    It can even be the cleverness of how a message is woven into an otherwise meaningless looking scene.







  • It was bad writing pretty much across the board. Poe, Rey, Finn, and Leia got a pass from me mostly based on not being introduced as a barrier to the other characters and having got shit done previously. I felt as negatively about Luke as I did about Rose or Holdo in that movie, worse even because he could have been and done so much more, despite his past (or maybe because of it, ep 8 Luke was just a disappointment compared to his previous versions, like they took his only negative trait from the earlier films, his whining, and made that his main trait, despite him being mostly over it in ep 6).

    And I agree that Rose wasn’t a Mary Sue, but figuring out the weakness of hyperspeed tracking based on nothing at all was a Mary Sue moment (and Finn looked just as stupid for enthusiastically guessing where her mind was headed).

    And some differences between Poe’s and Holdo’s plans were a) the audience was informed of Poe’s plan (which sounded a lot like a typical Star Wars plan similar to their infiltration of the death star in ep 4) and for all we knew, Holdo had no plan but slowly let her ships get picked off as they ran out of fuel, and b) Poe’s plan made the chase that made up most of the movie more interesting while Holdo’s was a stall and run, which might have been a better plan but was so underwhelming after so much of the movie focused on that stupid chase.

    And yeah, misogyny certainly played a role in the vehemence of the reaction and the bullying of the actors. Incels and other flavours of hate have a higher representation than average in a lot of nerdy niches. I just think that the producers chased that controversy rather than it falling upon them and resent that they did that to those actors even knowing how “fans” had reacted to kid Anakin and Jar Jar.


  • Rose could have been fine if they didn’t write her character as basically a cop during the introduction, a Mary Sue that figures out the weakness of tech where the start of the conversation was “that tech is impossible” (plus the weakness itself is completely out of left field), spend half of their field trip whining instead of doing their kinda urgent mission, and then the biggest thing she does is prevents a sacrifice that might have actually redeemed the movie somewhat, in a way that would have been physically impossible, given the scene leading up to it (ordered to retreat, she obeys, Finn ignores it and speeds at top speed towards the thing they were retreating from, then she somehow intercepts him from the side and both walk away).

    The people that harassed the actor that played her are massive pieces of shit and this by no means justifies their response, but Rose seems like a character designed to draw hate.



  • I hate people who decide after dealing with the first problem caused by a lack of a rule that hasn’t existed for however long things were going on before the problem that it calls for a very general rule to prevent it from ever happening again. And somehow these assholes often end up in positions where they can set rules like that.

    Zero tolerance policies in schools are another example. Suspending a kid for making finger guns isn’t going to prevent school shootings. Banning nicknames isn’t going to prevent anyone from ever insulting someone. It’s just lazy and comes from a desire to reduce complex situations that require thought and maybe complex solutions to simple situations that don’t require much thought and have a simple solution.


  • I used to do that and liked it, but dropped the habit somewhere along the way. It doesn’t even feel that bad after the initial shock passes. It’s even pleasant, and then when you get out, the water is cooler so won’t evaporate as readily, do it’s not just that you’re more used to the cooler temperature, but it also doesn’t get as cold because evaporation takes away more heat than the higher temperature water provides.

    Also, use your hands as squeegees before you get out of the shower area and your towels won’t go stinky as quickly (because they dry out quicker due to not needing to absorb as much water).