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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t think the wacky was the probable, nor was the juxtaposition of the incredible darkness of the plot against that wackiness. Any of those elements could work and well – it’s honestly Waititi’s specialty (that’s exactly what made Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople so great – that they were attacking deeply, deeply dark themes under a safe and protective umbrella of silliness).

    What made Love and Thunder fail is just that it wasn’t made very well. The writing was kind of poor and it didn’t tie into much of a greater story. You can never save a movie from bad writing and it just had vaguely bad writing. Always feels like the writing is the first cost these projects try and trim when it should be the only one they never do.

    And worse, 2 of the great actors of my lifetime were totally squandered.

    In my opinion, the audience was never convinced that Portman’s character was actually suffering and addicted to the hammer, which made the sacrifice of what she was doing totally uncompelling. She’s capable of playing that role, but instead they turned who should’ve been the hero into a total sidekick.

    I was also entirely unconvinced that Bale’s character was… wrong. They literally had to make the plot about him gathering a bunch of children to murder in order to convince us to dislike him. His backstory was so convincing that his revenge felt like a quest to root for. He performed the character well enough to make you sympathize with him, yet they just had him kick a puppy to make his heel turn. Weak.


  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlLegitimate interest?
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    8 months ago

    This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

    It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.

    Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

    The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.









  • This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

    The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

    I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

    The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

    While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

    We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.



  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlVLC - App stores were a mistake
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    9 months ago

    Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.

    They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.

    I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.





  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlVLC - App stores were a mistake
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    9 months ago

    Why does it have to be a company?

    Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.

    But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.

    Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn’t the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren’t supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.



  • Our of curiosity, which specific MS product is the one you see as most valuable / hardest to do without for IT security?

    I can’t imagine it’s word or excel or anything document-centric. That’s what most people think of when they think of MS Office, but in this day and age there are plenty of totally servicable alternatives. This from someone who both freely admits MS Word is the best wysiwyg editor and still refuses to use it. The sharing/collaboration stuff is pretty tight with MS Office, but my experience is that most people don’t use it and just email around attachments even though it makes more savvy people want to pull their hair out.

    I have to assume Outlook’s the big boy, right? Email & sync? And then, I assume, there’s lot of cloud services that typical end users don’t even know is there?



  • It’s most likely a cause and effect reversal, in my opinion.

    The conversation was happening because of the ads, not the other way around. Advertising works. It manipulates us into changing behavior, even without us realizing.

    A real conversation makes you think about the thing being advertised, leading to you notice what would otherwise be totally below-the-radar things. People don’t like to imagine they have been manipulated, so the conspiracy of the listening phone seems preferable.

    Block all ads. All the time. They are bad for us.