I love the lotr movies but even the extended editions can’t fit in the nuances of all the supporting characters. this gets worse the later you get in the trilogy, the biggest victims probably being the ents, faramir, denethor and pippin.

my own personal pick is probably one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, where they change McMurphy’s crime from battery and gambling to statutory rape. that did not engender sympathy

I will go to bat for the later seasons of Fargo, in particular seasons 3 and 5.

spotify pays me half a cent per stream, the profit margins for them must be fucking insane. and the music sounds like shit. I’d much rather people pirate it than support these leeches

if you want to support artists you like, buy the music, ideally on bandcamp. if you do have to steam it, Deezer at the very least won’t vandalize the audio

About 10 years ago I worked at a company that had broken ground on a solar factory in the UK. The government cancelled subsidies for solar and they pulled out.

disco elysium is mostly driven by character and theme rather than plot. you’re not expected to solve the mystery, the game is more interested in which sidequests you engage with, how you treat the other characters, and how you choose to interpret the story. the choices you make don’t influence the mystery but they do influence the events of the mercenary tribunal, phasmid encounter and the final scene quite a lot. the tribunal is mostly about how well you did at the detective work and your relationship with Kim, whereas the phasmid encounter is about Harry’s inner journey, then the results of both of these scenes filter through to the confrontation with the other cops.

I also think the game does a pretty good job of setting these expectations, because for most of the game you just think the hardy boys did it, instead the game works pretty hard to make you curious about other things and you end up just going through the motions of the actual investigation

the deserter is probably one of the weaker characters, he does feel like a plot device, but he’s there to let the story connect the events of the game and harry’s own personal journey directly and literally to the history and politics of revachol, i think that’s probably why they decided to make him the killer in the first place

my understanding is that Mozilla paid good money for pocket and never made much from it

PewDiePie is the most basic kind of cryptofascist hiding behind a veil of edgy humour and he should not be welcome in the open source community

I know this is a meme but historians like Livy never used to let facts get in the way of a compelling historical narrative. obviously these sources provide a lot of useful information but taking them at their word is the equivalent of historians in the year 4000 trying to recreate 21st century life out of nothing but Joe Rogan podcasts

it is 2019, the 2060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2020, the 3060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2023, the 4060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2025, the 5060ti has 8gb of vram.

I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it’s not too bad if you’re an experienced Linux user but it’s still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you’re a new Linux user then you’re basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time

the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever

in my opinion the market is too segmented. Facebook took Oculus and refocused them onto standalone vr instead of pcvr, and secluded away a bunch of releases as Oculus exclusives. psvr is in a similar state. there isn’t enough vr software being made to support two separate walled gardens plus steamvr. in their rush to establish a vr monopoly, Facebook killed it. that’s my opinion

I’ll be hanging onto my vive cosmos for occasional games of beat saber but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty

pisses me off that they call it an image editor

SoundCloud might be the single worst music platform out there, and that’s saying a lot given that Spotify exists. The audio quality is awful, everything is expensive and they double and triple dip artists and listeners. Yet despite the exploitative monetisation, they don’t seem to actually make any money and have almost gone bankrupt several times.

Kath & Kim is one of Australia’s finest cultural exports

just a few years away bro just a few more years just give us £500k for a new quantum computer bro just a few more years

the timeline in the pic is a bit off, but macos is definitely getting worse. I think mavericks was the last version that let you turn off mouse acceleration.

insightful comment. just one small criticism: there are a lot of artists out there who happen to exist within this capitalist economic system, who need to sell their art for money so that they don’t starve or become homeless. and these people probably don’t want their art and their style to be reproducible by ai because that would threaten their ability to house and feed themselves.

I’m all in favour of abolishing intellectual property, but only as part of a broader change to our economic system that would allow artists to support themselves without having to worry about ownership. besides, these ai tools aren’t really ‘sharing’ art, they’re just allowing big tech companies to consolidate wealth and power

finally, your point about art rarity is not really relevant to the discussion, these tools are intended for people distributing digital art, not people speculating on physical art

object orientated programming is the wrong idiom for almost all problems, and even in the few cases where it makes sense, you have to be very careful or it’ll hurt you

alphafold had set the field of protein folding back a decade