Exactly. Cinema is for big and bright and loud and social. Anything else can wait, because apart from offering spectacle and community, cinemas are fucking awful if you have a decent TV and a soundbar. Just like we stopped doing lowest-common-denominator melodrama in live theaters once the moving pictures came long, cinemas in the era of bigscreens and streaming will settle into the niches where they provide unique advantages.

I think this one was Cruise trying to prove he is still a thespian, and not just the last relic of the monoculture movie star system. Also, this:

It marked the first film in a new pact with Cruise — the biggest movie star in the world — to make original and franchise films with Warner Bros. Pairing him with Iñárritu, one of only three directors to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars, seemed like a no-brainer.

They definitely over-committed financially on this Temu Kubrick movie (though from what I understand it’s still half-decent), but I think what they’re really banking on is whatever franchise or action fodder they extract from his aging bones and veneers.

Not sure. I think we’ve got a Slop Warning, though. That screen on the left says neither Ken nor Ryu, and many other things are off too, even compared to a staged stock photo. I wonder if the prompt included the text of the article and it’s seizing on this:

Over time the back-to-back cabinet arrangement became popular, with the two players on opposite sides, unable to see each other.

Though of course, even if it has then it’s still got the concept completely wrong.

And until then they’ll need AC’s. Welcome to life in the American Midwest, everybody! It’s very sustainable!

It’s time Smith reevaluates his hot take-first approach and considers the consequences of his actions.

Narrator: He will not.

While the idea that SAS holds any position legitimately is kind of laughable, there is an underlying narrative here. He’s saying this to articulate a very common and unhealthy attitude that professional sports is somehow a nobler calling than any other and that living out fans’ vicarious fantasies is some moral obligation. The fact that he said it undoubtedly means a lot of people, most of them men, feel it.

I’m in some ways basic AF about things like pro sports. I enjoy them despite a whole host of underlying issues. Still, I always try to segregate what I feel as a fan from what these people, some of whom have never known anything other than a toxic pressure cooker of a lifestyle, actually need and feel for themselves. If somebody wants to bail four games into a season, or in training camp like Andrew Luck, then so be it; clearly whatever they were dealing with was intense enough to override a lifetime of SAS’es telling them how they are supposed to think about their chosen profession. If there’s any upside to the obscene amount of money the stars make – apart from the fact that it annoys their billionaire employers to give it to them – it’s that it should allow them to be free to make their own decisions.

All good. Appreciate both memes, LOL.

“What would happen if there was another hypothetical 9/11?” [Sgt. Banks] says. “I hate to say it, but why would any nation, ever again, partner with the United States, if this is how they treat their closest neighbour and ally?”

Fair enough.

That looks like a teenage changeling who’s just not very talented.

Weird Aunt it is, then.

This part is also worth pointing out:

In Orélien’s case, there is a complicating factor: since the controversy around AI surfaced, he has also been accused of plagiarism. The New York Times writes, “Radio Canada, a national public radio station, said that Mr. Orélien had plagiarized four opinion articles published in 2012 and 2013 on French and Canadian news sites. It also said that chunks of his award-winning 2012 short story, ‘Où va le monde,’ resembled parts of a French book published in 1960, Le Matin des Magiciens.”

If it was produced in the last ten years, is there any real chance it’s not your first option?

I keep rp2040 microcontrollers around for keyboards, but I just used one to make a PicoMite VGA, a functional boot-to-BASIC computer.

I’d be happy to be wrong, but it seems unlikely that anything with an optical drive would be the most durable.

Poop where you need to poop,

And let the turds fall out.

Honestly, I wanna see you be brave

With where you have to stay,

And let the poo fall out.

Honestly, I wanna see you be brave!

Last minute change, you say? Right when desperate MAGAs are shooting their wad and dumping tons of money into advertising to try to limit the damage, you say?

Huh.

I had that thought too, but what a weird choice to use generative AI.

What kind of plug is that? Type I should have slanted blades on the bottom, right?

Interesting. Twain/Clemens was definitely a cat person. Despite protesting a bit much that he didn’t, it seems he liked dogs well enough (never trust somebody who hates dogs, btw), but he identified with cats much more closely. He was of the school that wonders how you can respect a creature that loves humans unconditionally. He also didn’t like barking.

Even if he couldn’t respect them fully, he did appreciate their good nature, and especially in his older years where his writing developed a particularly acerbic streak of misanthropy, he constantly compared them favorably to humans:

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

And, after his daughter died (epilepsy), he spent his last few months with her German Shepherd as his frequent companion.

I do not like dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it; but I have liked this one from the beginning, because he belonged to Jean… The dog came to see me at eight o’clock this morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters hereafter.

One thing I’m pretty confident he didn’t say is “The more I learn of men, the more I like my dog.” While it’s in character with some of the other quotes, it had been going around as a French witticism since the 1700s and eventually got attributed to Twain not long after his death.

A man’s treatment of a dog is no indication of the man’s nature, but his treatment of a cat is. It is the crucial test. None but the humane treat a cat well.

-Mark Twain