“you’re telling me ALL of the wiring for the most important fingers goes through one tiny, fragile hole?”

That’s more than one a year. That can’t be right.

Looking at the Wikipedia for it, that number comes from a Washington Post country guide with absolutely no context or source to back it up. So I’m not confident that’s correct. The Wikipedia article itself details less than 30 coups. They have one every few years sure, but it’s not like every 9 months for 160 years someone was trying to overgrow the government.

If it were actually AI I might have some faith.

This isn’t a neural net processor, not a learning computer. It’s a fucking mechanical Turk. A bad one.

What he’s talking about isn’t capable of deriving new ideas. It’s just going to spit out shit it’s seen already.

The library of Babel is just as likely to give us the answers he’s talking about. More likely maybe because it’s at least already written down.

Bacon and ice cream go great together and I refuse to pretend they don’t.

I still miss midnight snack ice cream. Potato chips covered in chocolate. Delicious

I love how this image is a pun

BE QUIET

Your data isn’t yours to keep. It’s already gone, for sale to the highest bidder for pennies, several times a day.

But it IS yours to spoil. Become unhinged.

I want to see someone try.

Not because it’s practical, or because it makes sense. But because it sounds like it makes sense but I’m practice would be so impractical and hard that the solution would be absolutely hilarious.

You’re driving along the freeway at 70 miles an hour, and a jet powered super drone rockets along side the car carrying a 2000 pound brick of lithium and drops it on top of you like a fucking dump truck. The shock crushes the cheap Chinese car like a can of soda and the sudden change in weight sends the drone careening off in to the air at a reasonable percentage of mach 1. The last thing you see on this earth as your brain matter is squeezed out of your eye sockets like toothpaste is a wide eyed driver in the car next to you.

The resulting pile up kills 4 people immediately, and several more later as they get caught in an expanding wave of lithium battery fires that either burn them to death or suck all of the oxygen out of the air.

So those indie films definitely still get made, sometimes. But there’s a big fucking asterisk attached to that. Fox searchlight and another of similar firms will buy movies that have already been made and give them a wider audience. A24 also produces films that would traditionally fly the insie circuit. But for the most part, these movies are being paid for by the people making them, and whether or not they ever see that money returned is purely a matter of luck.

Kevin Smith has a long story about how he managed to finance one of his movies only because he’d done a shitty Bruce Willis movie. And relatively speaking the movie the financed was peanuts compared to what some can cost.

Sometimes sequels are how movies get made at all.

There’s a story about the suggested sequel to the gladiator that has Maximus traveling through fucking time. The reason that movie was pitched was because the director and the writer specifically did not want to make that movie. But the contract for the Gladiator required a multiple movie deal if it was successful. So they pitched the craziest shit imaginable and the studio let them out of the contact.

A lot of movies are made this away. Original IP doesn’t get picked up unless a studio thinks they can milk it.

Did it? Didn’t that release straight to streaming?

I remember seeing Kung fu panda in the theater with my niece, walking away thinking, well that was a nice complete story and forgetting about it.

There is a 4th one now???

I didn’t make it very far in to the game, I’d held on to my game pass subscription just waiting for it to come out, and cancelled my game pass after a few hours in Starfield. I made it to like the first big city a few small settlements after that, and everything felt so fucking lifeless. NPCs just didn’t seem to belong in the space they inhabited. Oblivion and Skyrim NPCs really seemed like they owned the space they inhabited. Fallout 4 even once you got your settlements going really felt like they were home. The constant loading screens just made everything feel like it’s own little universe, apart from the rest of the game. I did have fun raiding some base around the moon, one of the few times I had fun exploring. One of the few times I had fun, honestly.

Seven dollars to loading screen to your ship, watch an animation of your character sitting down, loading screen to space, loading screen to the system it’s in, Dodge some pirates, loading screen to the surface, hop along the completely barren landscape to go to a copy pasted outpost, loading screen back to your ship?

I feel like you could get all of the value of that dlc by just playing a mission over again.

Cixin Liu imagines exactly that towards the end of the Three Body series. Among other things, which make the series worth absolutely slogging through at points.

Here’s a fun fact that I think of every time I read about light delay.

We assume the speed of light is the same in all directions but there’s no way to prove that it is.

It could be light speed is instantaneous in one direction, and half the speed we think it is in the reverse. Any test we could devise depends on information traveling in two directions, nullifying any discrepancies in light speed.

People think this is real? I’ve been retelling this joke since I first heard it.

I mean the anti vax campaign worked well for Russia, so why not sew doubt in preventive measures during a global health crisis?

This bike does not exist. This is part of a series of theoretical renders from what must be 15 to 20 years ago. When carbon fiber was kind of a new material to the general consumer. The premise was they could not only reduce the weight of the material but because carbon fiber was this space age super material that could melt your tits off if you looked at it sideways, that they could also reduce the need for structural materials like spokes and triangles. Making a featherweight racing bike. Most of the designs had absolutely no way to steer them.

I see a hot new name drop coming in.