Those are such nice resources that I didn’t know of! Thanks a lot, gonna dig into both in the next weeks.

How did I never hear about this? I definitely need Hercules with lightsabers in my life now!

On a side note it’s crazy how many times the trailer guy said the name of the movie. Every sentence gotta involve Hercules at least once.

If they went all out like that I’d respect it a lot more. Give me the Odyssey but make everyone look straight outta Warhammer or something crazy like that.

Poor guy. Classic case of nominative determinism.

I don’t care about historical accuracy. For all I care they could be fighting in pink miniskirts if it looks good and makes sense with the setting of the story. I just think this is disappointing because he looks like a mall ninjas idea of a badass.

Every creatively dead Netflix/Prime fantasy franchise has the same shein-ass looking costume design nowadays.

Achilles is gonna load up on monster energy before he naruto-runs to vanquish his enemies.

And by vanquish I mean getting stabbed in the heel and fucking dying.

That helmet looks like my man is carrying one of these knives to battle:

Interesting to read this in the telegraph. If I recall correctly they were pro leave during the campaign leading up to the referendum.

I’m OOTL, what did contrapoints do?

In the long run I’d miss my loved ones too much. For a year or so? I’d love it!

How is your trip going? And how long did your 500€ last you? Assuming you already spent them, what are you doing now to sustain yourself?

I personally know a few people who do similar stuff or use it as therapist. It’s anecdotal of course but I don’t think many people using AI for personal connections and interactions is very surprising. Before AI people used chat boards, blogs, social media and google to talk about and commiserate about their problems, now it’s AI. There was an “AI” called Eliza in the late 60s and people already were using that as a therapist and attributed intelligence and real emotions to it.

This whole thing says more about the availability and demand for real human connection and therapy than it does about the individuals who use it.

This is a frequently repeated quote attributed to the late philosopher Frederic Jameson. On its own it doesn’t make a statement about capitalism or what it is at all. (If you wanna know more about Jamesons theories on capitalism you can read about it in his books)

Jameson’s quote points out that people often find it easier to picture possible world ending doomsday scenarios, than it is for them to think about alternatives to living in a capitalist world to try to avoid these scenarios.

You can even test this yourself. Ask people around you about the end of the world and many will point out reasons like climate change, demographic changes, environmental destruction, pollution, world wars, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts (shoutout Roland Emmerich) and even biblical scenarios for an eventual end of the world as we know it.

But ask them if they think there are other ways to live, so that those things won’t happen and usually they will just give you a version of “this is just how things are, not much you can do about it” or “the world could be different, but there is no use in trying because this is just a utopia and I have no idea how to change stuff anyways”.

Regarding your last paragraph, imo this kinda misses the point. I agree, there are structures that exist parallel to what most people consider capitalism, but ask people in most self described capitalist societies and they will not really recognise the difference and will just see it as an anomaly at best.

Btw, this is all coming from a European perspective, albeit heavily informed by US media.

Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…

We might have that here, but half the people I know work jobs that still expect them to be on call all the time and would get in serious trouble if they turned of their phones during busy periods. So while yes, in theory it’s great, our toxic work culture seems to cancel it out quite well.

I always tell those guys they should quit it or sue the fuck out of those assholes, but no one ever does -.-

Fair enough, I haven’t seen it yet. Also didn’t really notice how Decaprio heavy the list was until your comment.

No particular order. Also, it’s movies that I watched, can’t speak on essentials that I might be missing.

It’s kinda hard to make a list on essentials tho. Because your personal taste obviously plays a big role. I can’t see my girlfriend liking more than 10 percent of those…

Schindlers List

Gladiator

No country for old men

The grand Budapest hotel

The big Lebowski

The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers

Star Wars (the original one)

Requiem for a dream

Pulp fiction

The good, the bad, the ugly

The lives of others

La vita é Bella

All quiet on the western front (1930 version)

The dark knight

The Truman Show

2001: Space odyssey

Alien

7 Samurai

Princess Mononoke

Trainspotting

Boyz N the Hood

Scarface

The Godfather 1, 2

The Matrix

Clockwork Orange

Shutter Island

Kingdom of Heaven

Wolf of Wall Street

Honorable mentions because they are popular and everybody always talks about them (I like a lot of them, too. Don’t consider them essentials tho):

Inception

Interstellar

Fight Club

Harry Potter

Return of the King

Rest of Star Wars (whatever people consider the good ones at last)

Saving Private Ryan

Django Unchained

Toy Story

The Lion King

How about chess? I know you said you are not really looking for video games, but chess to me is a bit different to video games.

I had a similar problem to you a few years ago during Covid. I was very stressed and lonely and didn’t know what to do with myself. I am completely addicted to chess now. To the point that I play for like 4-8h a night sometimes. Time passes fast, especially in the shorter time modes. And if you are looking for a more low stakes, slow paced distraction you can play correspondents chess and think about your next move for 1.5 hours.

Bonus: if i tell people that i play chess for over an hour every day, they often assume i am a genius, even tho I’m just a 800 elo idiot like most people

People in western nations are largely responsible for climate change. Someone in Syria won’t be flying around the world and buying new clothes all the time. But they will be the ones hit the hardest by climate change, so they will likely either die or become refugees trying to come to the west.

Also, a lot of our western wealth is based on exploitation of those nations (through colonialism and later capitalism or wars). So if westerners don’t want people from poor countries to come to the west they should help those nations to recover from that exploitation.

Furthermore we need to do these things, because a bigger influx of desperate migrants will steer western politics even further to the right. That’s never a great thing and will lead to more inequality and possibly the collapse of our democratic systems.

Finally to your point about migrants being more criminal. That is largely a result of worse economic circumstances and outlooks. Improve their chances and watch the crime rate drop.

I know, but no one cares who’s responsible at the moment. What people care about is that they read a new article about Boeings planes endangering passengers every 3 days. So while Delta is most likely at fault, Boeing is gonna take the hit to the company image. That’s why I was specifically speaking about the Boeing PR team. Those guys and the crisis managers won’t be able to catch a break for a loooong time.

I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.

Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.

You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.