whofearsthenight
@whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
- Comment on This split sink 1 year ago:
- Comment on ‘The Marvels’ Meltdown: Disney MCU Seeing Lowest B.O. Opening Ever At $47M+ 1 year ago:
Yeah, that’s probably fair, or at least close to what I was getting at. Personally, I could give a shit if they do some stuff that has no major bearing on the overall story, but I personally found it to be basically filler material still. It’s fine.
Like I know it’s unlikely, but I would not mind at all if for example the next Spider-Man has almost no connection to the overall MCU given where they’re at in the story, as long as it’s good.
- Comment on ‘The Marvels’ Meltdown: Disney MCU Seeing Lowest B.O. Opening Ever At $47M+ 1 year ago:
I don’t think so, I just think these movies have largely not been very good. Like, I really liked Loki S2, have rewatched NWH a hundred times, I liked the Marvels, etc. The problem isn’t superheroes, you can use that as a backdrop for just about any type of story you want to tell and it can be great. For example, WandaVision tells a very different kind of story than anything else and it was really good. But of course, Marvel decides (I’m guessing late into post-production) they’re going to fuck up all of that character development in a post-credits scene and then ignore it entirely in the next movie.
I think they’re going to have to get a lot more creative about what types of stories they want to tell and what themes they want to get after and stop making them feel like cookie cutter properties. The early phases I think managed this a little better. Like, I remember walking out of TWS and thinking “damn, that was a really good Bond film with a Captain America skin on it” which is a compliment. Somewhere in there the whole thing got really generic.
- Comment on ‘The Marvels’ Meltdown: Disney MCU Seeing Lowest B.O. Opening Ever At $47M+ 1 year ago:
I think the problem is not that they didn’t have a clear direction for the big bad (look back at the Infinity Saga, Thanos is barely spelled out and there is very little overarching continuity towards leading up to IW/EG) I think the problem is that most of what you listed are just mediocre to not good. Out of all of those, I would probably only count the following as being good to great:
- Spider-Man: Far From Home
- Wandavision
- Loki (both seasons)
- Shang Chi
- Spider-Man: No Way Home
- Werewolf By Night
- Ms. Marvel (on this one, I might even be fudging a little just because I love Iman in the role)
- Guardians of the Galaxy 3
- Marvels*
Out of roughly 22 on the list there, that’s a just impressively bad hit rate. Not everything I left off of my list is “bad” per se, but it’s mostly just mediocre and I have about a zero percent chance of rewatching it (Falcon, Ant-Man 3, MoonKnight, Dr Strange, Wakanda, etc.) compared to the Infinity Saga, where I’ve seen just about everything multiple times. And then there is the problem that quite a lot of it is bad (Eternals, Thor, Secret Invasion…) I think doing this much TV really hurt them as quite a lot of the TV properties were poorly thought out and didn’t have 6 hours worth of good story.
I don’t think that the idea that having all of the tie-ins really hurt them as much as the perception that all of the tie-ins were required watching hurt them. For example, The Marvels you can totally go in without having watched either of the TV properties, or probably even Captain Marvel. The movie guides you through what you need to know, which is very little, but that is a theme on basically any comment page or article when you talk about the film’s box office draw. I mean, we’re not talking about Breaking Bad or the good seasons of Game of Thrones where if you didn’t watch from the beginning you’re going to miss big moments.
and re: your point 2, this is also the case for the MCU Carol. The movie was among the worst in the IS, and while Brie Larsen is a fantastic actress, we’re several outings in before you can even kinda care about Carol in the Marvels. Ironically, I counted this as a plus for the movie when I was telling my buddy if he should go see it. I saw Endgame opening night, and the audience was right there for all of the big moments, which you can tell they intended Carol’s destruction of the ships to be, and while it wasn’t quite crickets, you could tell that didn’t hit the way they wanted it to. Even this movie, I went to see in spite of it being a CM movie if anything.
* This one might be recency bias or maybe just that the MCU has been so disappointing that I’m grading on a curve a bit, but I would give this one a solid 3/5.
- Comment on I'm not asking to be rich. 1 year ago:
I think it is that and a bit about not letting envy of other people’s wealth/property interfere with your ability to be happy, eg: keeping up with the Jones’s. Obviously you can be wealthy and still not be happy (see Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, etc) but for the vast majority I think the thing is that money, or specifically the lack of it, is the source of a quite a lot of unhappiness. Now, maybe if I had a million dollars, I’d still be a miserable bastard, but given that most of the problems I have now are either directly money related or significantly impacted by the lack of said money, I kind of doubt it.
- Comment on Instagram's monthly subscription 1 year ago:
From me? Of course not. Unfortunately, I do live in society and do have to share my contact info with others, and I’m guessing the vast majority of people just spam the “okay” button as Facebook asks for contact access, mic access, camera access, access to your colon, etc.
- Comment on Instagram's monthly subscription 1 year ago:
Meta already demonstrably does this. I deleted my real Facebook in like 2016. Around 2019-2020, I created a new burner account to browse Marketplace with nearly all fake info expect my name, phone, and email. And lo and behold all of my friend suggestions are people I know and mostly were on the old account. The most charitable I can imagine is that those suggestion had me in their contacts which they agree to share with Facebook (which is problematic af imo) but it is extremely likely they just retain all of data especially since many of the people I was suggested have never had my current number/email.
- Comment on The hardest workers get the smallest pay. 1 year ago:
This is I think the case mostly for bad leaders. Good leaders share credit and take the blame. This is why your examples are good ones. Elon isn’t responsible for the site instability, that was the old management that allowed bad infrastructure (neverminding Elon firing 80% of the staff, only retaining those held hostage by their H1B, everyone with the slightest clue knowing that was inevitable, and that previous to Elon’s management twitter had been rock solid for 5-10 years.) It’s not Trump’s fault the economy crashed, unemployment went through the roof, supply chains fell apart, that was all COVID! Which of course had nothing to do with his complete and utter mismanagement of it in spite of having a playbook literally written for him. But he will take 100% credit for operation lightspeed, which he apparently came up with all by himself in between genius ideas like shoving a light bulb up your ass, drinking bleach, or just closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” because the real problem was that we testing for COVID, not that COVID existed and was killing people.
It’s something I am honestly surprised that people don’t see through immediately. I have a massively, and I can’t overstate this enough, massively less important role, and this behavior wouldn’t be tolerated. If I went to my boss and said something like “I’m sorry we missed the numbers this quarter, Johnson really fucked me” I’d probably be fired right there. Good leaders have to own their decisions. If you empower someone who fucks up, it’s still your fuck up. If a toddler shoots someone, you don’t go “man that kid really should know gun safety” you say “wow which adult was entirely irresponsible/negligent?”
The only value high level leaders provide is in the decision making, and they own all of them. Like, no one on earth is or ever will be qualified to be president. You have to be an expert in fields it takes people entire lifetimes to be good at. Your job is to assemble a team of experts and smart people, and hopefully when they present you with different options you choose the best one. But you the leader still choose, and that’s the whole role. If you also want to abdicate responsibility, literally what is the point of CEOs? Especially ones paid a few bajillion dollars more than the rest of us?
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
That covers a small subset of the reason a lot of us set it up the way we have. I mean, if that is working for you, great. But you still have to move a physical device, and the ability to watch media is still limited to the location of said device.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
If I understand your setup, when you decide you want to a new movie you have to download it, pull the hdd over to the machine, transfer it to the hdd, rename, perhaps even transcode, and then put the drive back on the TV.
In the type of setup described above or like mine, I can pull out my phone and using a very simple search all of the file handling and such is taken care of for me. I don’t ever have to worry if I have the right filetype for the device I’m on, and I can watch that from any device on my local network, or just about any device that has an internet connection. Also, while I’m watching one thing, several other people can be watching whatever else they want on their devices.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
I’m still maining plex, and at least there, they just create a plex account, you grant access to that account, and that’s it. Don’t even have to open ports. My guess is with JF since there isn’t a central account host, you’d probably have expose some ports on your network to be able to login without a VPN.
- Comment on What is going to happen when people realize climate change is rolling in? 1 year ago:
Or as we call it in America, Tuesday. It’s already here, people don’t realize it. People already have acclimated to “wildfire season,” for example, a thing that didn’t exist until the last 5 years or so in this area, as a totally normal occurrence.
- Comment on America is so great we privatized taxes 1 year ago:
Thanks. I mean, I’m fine. I’m sorry that this is the reality for the simplest of things in this country.
- Comment on America is so great we privatized taxes 1 year ago:
We Americans just pay more for worse outcomes basically by any way you want to slice it.
We have a whole layer of leeches on our system that exist solely to suck us dry. They aren’t there to help us, they’re there only to get in the middle of us and our doctors and extract as much value as possible, even when that means using their untrained reckons or just sheer “fuck you we don’t want to pay for that” to deny treatment of doctor’s who’s literal job it is to prescribe the treatment.
- Comment on America is so great we privatized taxes 1 year ago:
I have insurance. I went to urgent care when I was pretty sure I had the flu or COVID or something about a year ago (just slightly before COVID was declared “over.”) I paid my copay for doctors office visit, I was in there for about an hour, with roughly 40 minutes of that sitting in a room waiting for a doctor (in an empty clinic) and then had a flu test and a COVID test.
They still sent me to collections for $350 for this visit. I pay a stupid amount for insurance, which my employer subsidizes, and I still can’t even get a fucking flu/COVID test apparently.
For profit health insurance in America is evil. It is easily one of the most fucked up things about this country that we just absolutely ignore.
- Comment on Really? 1 year ago:
I don’t know that I would get too excited about a small, but growing, fascist movement forming its own party. Seems we’ve seen that one before, didn’t seem to work out great.
- Comment on Really? 1 year ago:
That’s pretty much what’s happened. Cheney, Kinziger, etc. I’m not sure what the overlap of R’s sitting in districts Biden won by a lot, but I’m guessing there aren’t many.
I mean, this is of course the Republican parties own doing. They’ve been poking at the rabid dog that is their base for decades and accelerated further with the tea party, birther nonsense, catastrophizing a tan suit, etc, on top of their usual cries to cut education and social programs. Now they can’t control the monster they have created, which is honestly at least a little satisfying, except, you know, the whole sane people still being also trapped with the monster also part.
- Comment on Why do many folks play follow the leader even into adulthood? 1 year ago:
Word. I think you’re correct and I think a big part of things is that leadership truly requires taking responsibility. So they often mistake their own failures as bad leadership because people have a much easier time blaming the problem on anyone but themselves. Talk to just about anyone about why they didn’t get a good review or got fired or got passed by for a promotion, and very rarely do they take ownership of the problem and instead blame just about anything else.
This is also I think tying into your idea that it’s easy to be a bad leader and the common conception of bad managers (especially middle managers.) Bad leaders blame the team or the market or the next level up in management, and rarely take ownership for the failures of the team because again, people just aren’t wired to do that very well.
These sound sort of contradictory, but I think that the ideas can coexist. A person might fail that has a good leader, but if they really are a good leader, they’re going to be asking themselves if they could have done something differently to help that person under them succeed. And if they are a good leader, that person’s failure won’t be allowed to become the team’s failure.
- Comment on Why do many folks play follow the leader even into adulthood? 1 year ago:
Everyone can identify bad leadership
Even this I think is a little questionable. People frequently mistake their failures as failure of leadership.
- Comment on Don't forget to tip 1 year ago:
For the first few, but there is a point at which it stops being feasible. “Hi, I’m interested in your one bedroom in Bumfuck, ID, how much is rent?” “Well, I own 17 properties so it’s $93,000 a month.”
- Comment on I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal 1 year ago:
They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.
That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.
So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.
- Comment on What are the connotations of Joe Rogan? 1 year ago:
Posted elsewhere, but what do you call 4 nazis drinking with a 5th person? 5 nazis.
- Comment on What are the connotations of Joe Rogan? 1 year ago:
Indeed. It’s like the world championship of cosplaying as a smart person.
- Comment on What are the connotations of Joe Rogan? 1 year ago:
broken clock yada yada
- Comment on What are the connotations of Joe Rogan? 1 year ago:
This. Alex Jones has been a not-infrequent guest. Jones, and others that Rogan has platformed in the guise of “just asking questions” are akin in my eyes to the ol’ “What do you call four nazis drinking with a fifth person? Five nazis.”
Aside from that, he’s got a massive amount of absolutely horrifically bad scientific and medical opinions. I’ve heard him described and Gwyneth Paltrow but for tech bros, and even that’s a little generous. Shove a lemon up your hooha or whatever Gwyneth is up to is probably not quite as problematic as “take this horse tranq to cure your covid” esp. during the alpha wave.
- Comment on Is there a title (Mr/Ms/Mrs) that is gender neutral? 1 year ago:
stolen from a post on mastodon earlier, but: foolish mortal(s)
- Comment on Steve Jobs: The difference of stealing yourself vs being stolen from 1 year ago:
“somewhat” is doing a lot of work here. I mean, they didn’t re-write the kernel, but you can google example of the UI pre and post iPhone announcement.
- Comment on Steve Jobs: The difference of stealing yourself vs being stolen from 1 year ago:
The timeline is technically correct but misleading, and please google what Android looked like prior to the iPhone announcement. While you’re there, might also want to check out the technical differences like iPhone prioritizing things like animation and user interaction. Wouldn’t also hurt to check out the first, say, 1-4 Android devices compared to literally just the first iPhone and tell us which one our phones look like today. Also, do we think that Apple was just like “here’s a new OS we made over winter break?” They announced in '06. Android was developed probably at a similar time, bought by Google, and then had to pivot hard after iPhone announcement, and harder still after hardware actually got into customer hands.
- Comment on Steve Jobs: The difference of stealing yourself vs being stolen from 1 year ago:
Just about every invention is obvious in hindsight. Take a look at what Android looked like pre-iPhone announcement and then post.
