merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 14 hours ago:
Yeah, and it sometimes makes sense just from an acting PoV, so you can forgive it. It’s hard to fit all the characters and cameras in a scene if someone lives in a typical cramped apartment. So, like in the Friends TV show, none of them has jobs that should indicate they’re rich. But, the sets they use for the apartments suggest they have huge apartments. In that show, Joey’s apartment isn’t beautifully furnished, it looks fairly cheap. But, it’s really spacious for NYC. But, it seems like it’s all about giving the director the freedom to frame shots to get everybody involved, and to allow characters to move around.
OTOH, A recent movie, “Black Bag” was terrible for this. I hated the movie because it was just impossible to believe. This guy, who’s supposed to be a British intelligence officer (i.e. living on government wages). His wife is also an intelligence officer. Yet, somehow, they live in this condo that looks like it would be about £5m to buy, or about £5000/month. Since the plot revolves around whether one of them is a traitor and is selling state secrets, it seems pretty obvious it’s this guy or his wife because no civil servant is living in a place like that on just a government salary.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 14 hours ago:
I remember that from S1, but it doesn’t show up in S2, does it? Maybe they took it down?
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 16 hours ago:
If you’re a Baron, maybe.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 18 hours ago:
It’s not just Home Alone for me. Almost every show I watch, I look at the places where the characters live with immense envy.
Lord of the Rings: Man, I’d love to live in that hobbit house. That looks incredibly cozy.
Daredevil: That is such a nice loft, and it has such great light. It’s unfair that a guy who’s blind doesn’t truly appreciate his great apartment because he can’t see.
Futurama: Fry’s a delivery boy and he lives in a robot’s closet, and it’s still better than where I live.
Only Murders in the Building: NYC and these guys have those kinds of amazing places? (To be fair, this is a major plot element of the 4th season)
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 18 hours ago:
If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.
Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn’t get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.
- Comment on To join Facebook these days, one must record a video selfie 1 day ago:
On one hand
C’mon, with a bit of effort you could have made this one into 5 paragraphs each one sentence long too!
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
It sounds like you’re saying “reaction” is something that happens in the head, while I’m saying “reaction” is something that happens in the body.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
Would your reaction time change? Maybe the neurons in your brain would be going at super speed, but maybe your peripheral nerves would still be slow. So, the time between hearing something and the signal getting to your brain would still take ages. Or, the light would hit your eyes, but it would be a long time before that was processed into a signal your ultra-fast brain could use.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
I once read a news article about a woman who had Eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory). It made her life shitty. She was never “in the moment”, because everything triggered a memory. She could never forgive anybody for their past slights, because they were always fresh in her memory. It wasn’t the ability to recall anything you wanted whenever you wanted to. Instead it was the condition where you constantly had detailed memories flooding in when something you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, felt, etc. triggered a memory, or a dozen memories.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
I like to imagine that this is what it’s actually like for The Flash, or Quicksilver or another speedster:
Sure, you can move super fast, but to do that, your thinking also has to speed up to handle that fast movement. So, it’s more like everything else in the universe slows down except you. Now, it’s still an amazing power, but think about those times when The Flash uses his super speed to build a brick wall nearly instantly, or to read every book in the library in the blink of an eye.
To you, building that brick wall takes what feels like a week. You’re running at what feels like 30 km/h to get a handful of bricks. It feels like it takes you about 20 minutes to get to the place with the bricks. You run them back to the place you’re building the wall, you put them into the wall. Then you run another 20 minutes to get the next load of bricks. While you’re doing this boring wall building, you can’t chat with anybody, you can’t listen to a podcast, you’re just stuck doing manual labour for what feels like a week without any distractions or entertainment.
If you speed-read every book in a library, that feels like it takes a month. Hopefully you like reading dry reference books, or whatever it is you’re reading, because that’s all you get to do for however long it takes. Someone watching you might see you flipping through the pages in fractions of a second. But, to you, it still feels like it takes 2 minutes or so per page, and that’s if the material isn’t difficult to understand.
Maybe super speed needs to come with super autism so that you get really engaged in these tasks and don’t mind sinking what feels like days, weeks or months into one monotonous thing.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
You can’t actually change time, just your perception of time. Your muscles don’t move any faster. If someone is throwing a punch at you and you slow down time, you can appreciate the fist moving at your face for an hour of your slowed-down time, but you still can’t dodge the punch. If you speed up time, you still need to eat, sleep, and perform other bodily functions. So, instead of getting hungry every few hours, you get hungry in what feels like seconds. And, since you don’t have super-speed, you need to slow time back down again so you can eat.
It might still be a power worth having, but it’s not as awesome as it might seem at first.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
You can only make small changes, and it doesn’t always work. So, you don’t actually know if you have the power or if something slightly improbable happened.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
IRS audits, people kidnapping you and/or your family to get at your money, an inability to know who likes you for yourself and who just wants your money…
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
Like misspelling “undo”?
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
Flying has its own built-in side effects.
Every time you take off, there’s a pretty good chance that people nearby will notice. The government will want to study someone who has the ability to fly, so they’ll start surveiling the area. Within a short time they’ll figure out who you are, and you’ll be captured and eventually dissected.
And, that’s assuming your flight superpower comes with the ability to breathe at high altitudes, the ability to resist the cold you’d be exposed to by flying, the ability to see while flying without having your eyes dry out, etc.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 days ago:
Whenever you do it, the fact you’re reading someone’s mind is announced loudly in their mind and in the minds of anyone nearby.
- Comment on Gave him an offer, then took it away. Thanks PayPal. 1 week ago:
I mean, the dude used to be at Binance. This isn’t someone making good decisions.
- Comment on Saint > Pope 3 weeks ago:
I still can’t get over that his policies are the result of what he watches on TV. I’m not talking about his watching the Sunday morning political shows. I’m talking fictional movies in prime time that result in new US policies.
At 9pm on Saturday WLRN aired “Escape from Alcatraz”. On Sunday another Trump policy was announced: he was re-opening Alcatraz prison.
This is at least the second time that people have figured out what Trump was watching on TV to cause him to issue a new crazy edict.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
That’s not something that can be solved by changing interest rates. To increase wages you need unions and for those unions to go on strike.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
I don’t remember what did it for me, I switched a while ago. But, I do clearly remember one time when I had the kind of moulded earphones that go really deep in your ear, and I caught the cable on something, and they got yanked out of my ears. That was pretty painful.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
Why are you so deep in your own bubble that you don’t believe that someone could simply prefer wireless? If that’s the case, you should get out more, meet more people, expand your horizons.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
Ooh, BUUURN! BUUUUUUUUUURN!!!
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
I’ve never lost one in at least a decade of using them. But, I don’t use the kind that just balance on the edge of your ear.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
Wireless means you plug it in occasionally, maybe once a week.
If you don’t value the convenience of wireless headphones, that’s great for you. For a lot of people, the cable is a real pain in the ass. It gets tangled up when it’s off. It gets caught up on things when it’s on, etc.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
If you’re listening to podcasts or music, latency doesn’t really matter.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, it’s a risk. But, there’s also a risk of getting your wired earbuds cord caught on something. I’ve had that happen and it yanked the phone off the table and sent it crashing to the floor. I’ve also had the buds get yanked out of my ears multiple times.
If I lived somewhere where winters were mild, I might still use wired headphones. When you only have to worry about a t-shirt or something managing the cord isn’t too bad. But, when you have to manage a hat, scarf, coat, etc. there are just too many things to get in the way of the cord.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 4 weeks ago:
You know what’s easier than a cable? No cable.
I’ll give you sound quality, but the whole reason that wireless earbuds took off is the hassle of wires.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
Because it would be nice to have a card number that looked plausible that could be used in movies. Imagine if every phone number in a movie had to be (555) 555-5555. It would break your suspension of disbelief.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
Too bad the Visa and Mastercard ones are so obviously fake.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
It doesn’t seem to be the case, but it would be interesting if there were CC numbers that were meant to be used in movies, similar to how 555-XXXX phone numbers are never real.