I’m just reminiscing, man.

That’s there take. I think context and audience makes a huge difference, so I’d rank it higher.

I remember the experience. I watched it at the Rave Cinema at the Baldwin-Crenshaw mall, in Leimert Park. And let me tell you: the theater was so fucking amped. This theater was built by Magic Johnson in a part of LA that hadn’t had a nice theater, and it’s held up well. The neighborhood has really come up around it, too, so when Black Panther played, it was filled with folks dressed to the nines. There was LA street fashion, Panafrican garb, kids grown-ups, elders… The movie was good to start with, but it was just hard not to get caught up in the energy in the air. It truly was an event.

What’s the drawback of self hosted? I’ve had a self-hosted instance running on a raspberry pi for a few months now, and so far it’s working out great.

I’ve gotta say that MCU armor peaked around Iron Man 2. And I’m disappointed that they didn’t take the opportunity to finally return to greatness.

I don’t mind high-tech armor, but I was so disappointed that we see her donning high tech shiny self-assembling armor in the first few minutes of the show.

I miss the gantry. I miss the sense that it was a physical thing. Imagine the prop artists preparing the parts of Riri’s suit that weren’t pure CGI. The casting and the polishing and the fingerprint removal before she put it on. How about this? Actually design a suit. Imagine you had a high enough power source to power it and repulsors exist. What would it look like? Imagine something like Andrea Piccinno’s exo frame with some plating and a motorcycle helmet. Remember the Mark 1? Remember watching the firmware boot up on an old CRT monitor while Yinsin sacrificed himself to buy Tony time?

I feel like what I’m saying is straight-up CRAZY to the people who make these shows. But PLEASE: if you must, work up to the fancy polished CGI stuff by the end! Let us see something that looks a kinda real. Let her impress us by showing us stages of development instead of literally starting with a product that is finished and capable of cross country flight!

Bring back a gantry. Or let us see her step in and tighten a harness! I feel like if these people were in charge of Top Gun, everyone would get in planes by just running onto an air ram in street clothes and getting launched into the cockpit while the plane is flying. ‘Flight suit? Ladder? No, audiences will be bored.’

It really disappoints me that this show is dismissing this opportunity. We got a glimmer of it in Wakanda Forever, but oh well.

My understanding was that she used up the grant money and/or overextended the term of her scholarship without graduating.

It was a little hazy, tho

If you’re wondering what the point is, you can just go to one and ask for a tour.

I pay $65 a month for a membership to my local YMCA mainly so I can use the pool.

I love LA.

Respectfully, this title gets under my skin.

Why so doomer? He might veto it. It wouldn’t be surprising. But why are you declaring a loss prematurely?

Don’t hope for things there’s no chance of. Fight to change the chances of things, and if you fail try and fight again and again until you win.

This headline reads like 2025 news Mad-Libs:

“[Proper noun] is using [Latest fad] to [Verb] [Ideological alignment adjective] [Conceptual noun]”

Try it:

“OpenAI is using Hydroflasks to destroy Catholic exceptionalism”

“Mark Cuban is using cryptocurrency to monetize white supremacist hope”

Good times./s

My brother and I (both 38) actively speak out and oppose it.

My mom has been sort of in a state of shocked bewilderment. She’s horrified and also constantly confused as though trying to comprehend how 2+2 = 5. For her, it doesn’t make sense: Jews aren’t killers, they’re victims. But they’re killing all these civilians. Why would anyone want to keep the war going instead of getting the hostages back? Netanyahu is a monster. We all know this. Why is he still in charge?

I’m sorry that she’s suffering (then again, anyone of concience is). She’s also expressed a sense of alienation, since she has no idea how others feel, because she doesn’t feel like it’s socially acceptable to say what she feels outside the home. But I’m grateful that this hasn’t created any conflict between me and her. She doesn’t feel as comfortable as I do saying the plain facts of it, but I remind her that all my convictions are a reflection of the values she raised in me, and I think that reflects highly of her.

Yeah, anyone looking for more info should check out Luckey’s blog:

https://palmerluckey.com/if-you-die-in-the-game-you-die-in-real-life/

The guy is a little nuts. This military tech bullshit is no surprise.

It’s really hard to know why people haven’t been supportive without knowing you and them better. But how do you know and interact with these folks? Do you have them over for drinks? Play games online? Do they all know each other? Did they know you or your ex first?

Thanks, I think so too.

I’m trying to expand on it a bit, because I think what’s still missing is a sense of stakes and grandeur.

What if the backdrop is that Croft (or similar protagonist) is working with a team that is uncovering new and valuable discoveries that reveal the art and culture of ancient people that were largely absent from history. It’s showing that some earlier group had settled an ancient valley prior to the arrival of a group that is culturally significant to a current regime. And as they’re making these discoveries, it’s becoming increasingly contentious politically among some faschy nationalist government (a la Orban, Erdogan, etc.)

Over time, they begin to face mounting pressure to secure the sites quickly before a rival team is sent in specifically with the goal of damaging them and stealing artifacts so that these finds aren’t able to be studied. And the protagonist, as the first person who the team relies on to safely document and preserve the site, is soon persued by a goon squad, allowing us some urban platforming levels as you work towards a final confrontation.

I wonder what it would look like to try and resolve some of these problems in a way that still provides a satisfying platformer experience.

Like, what if instead of these ruins being a bunch of traps with some key magical artifact that she heavily disturbs while passing through, what if the game was a platformer where you had to essentially erect scaffolding and lay down tarps in advance of a larger team? And the goal is to basically use climbing and athleticism to navigate the environment without disturbing an incredibly fragile environment?

Can you demonstrate how you would have composed the question?

I think people overthink spending money on things they don’t support. I think stealing it is justified, but If you’re doing academic studies or learning how to deprogram people, go ahead and buy a Nazi’s book if you have to.

That said, if you’re looking to argue with Holocaust deniers, trying to defeat them by studying their arguments is a classic blunder.

Conspiratorial thinking is rooted in social maladies, and attachment to a theory is a downstream effect. You can no more talk a Holocaust denier out of their belief with evidence than you can fix a broken water main by sand-bagging the street. If you’re trying to deprogram someone, you’ve got to learn how to get them to open up about the background experiences that led them to look for these answers and then usually find ways to help them find alternate communities that obviate their need for the conspiracy in a way that at least feels self-directed.

It’s a much slower process, but if that’s what you want to do, read up on that and don’t bother wasting money on Irving’s book.

This is an interesting observation. But honestly I don’t think this is really hard to explain at all.

I think within the genre of comic books, your point makes sense. But if we’re applying a lens of realism (which I think CA:WS did well, and I wish more Marvel movies would), Tony’s network intrusion would not have been at all likely to have uncovered that SHIELD had been ideologically compromised.

What we see in Avengers is that Tony secured unauthorized access to read files to which he wasn’t afforded access. First, it’s not actually at all reasonable to assume that he had full access to all SHIELD data everywhere, ever. It’s split across thousands of servers and departments. It wouldn’t be universally accessible to anyone. This is true even for large institutions that aren’t highly, highly sensitive intelligence operations. But it’d be doubly so for one that is. Most likely, he would’ve grabbed unencrypted traffic that was local to the helicarrier, recently accessed, and titled or contained notable text that was relevant to their current situation. That could certainly yield shipping manifests or operational plans to use the tesseract for weaponry.

But – and this is really the key thing – even if he had the ability to access all SHIELD records, and had the ability to meaningfully digest this enormous trove of information, it would still be incredibly hard to see that SHIELD was compromised. There aren’t going to be any emails that say “Hey Bob: did you kill Mike for finding out that we’re both Hydra foot soldiers? Hail Hydra, Lisa”.

Infiltration is a process of persuasion and carefully installing dual loyalists in key positions to compromise decision making processes, as you describe. It consists of grooming intelligence assets and identifying who can be trained to groom additional assets. That all takes place primarily through interpersonal conversations. There’s very, very, very little documentation of it in a file system that would reveal it if you didn’t already know about some compromised asset. To the outside world, all of HYDRA’s goals look so much like those of a modern international peacekeeping body that the only secret they need to keep is who the guns are pointed at and who has their fingers on the triggers. Which is fundamentally a key point of the movie.

I don’t want to say “none”, but I think of the film “Captain America: Winter Soldier” as having some of the tightest writing in superhero comic book movies. It’s something of an outlier a case study imo of strong storytelling that the whole thing is so competently put together. There are far fewer suspensions of disbelief than most superhero movies, imo.

Agreed.

There’s also not much reason not to use supports. A tree support wouldn’t as much time or material at all.

Everyone needs a little support sometimes.

Yeah, I feel like that’s a good deal. Especially if I get credit. I mean, I’d still do it if it was anonymous, but can you imagine the popularity of being the guy who cut off his fingers for world peace? Frankly you’d be kind of a monster not to do it. So many people lose hands for nothing at all. But being the guy with the robot fingers who gave the world peace and joy? Sure, sign me up. Sounds rad af.