I haven’t yet seen an in-depth interview with Villeneuve where he addresses whether or not he wants to continue making (admittedly thoughtful and overall excellent) adaptations vs original works.

Going back over his filmography, every film since Maelström (2000) (or perhaps Polytechnique in 2009) has been an adaptation of a previous work. I really love the work he does, and I would not want him to be tied down to existing properties. Then again, he may believe that adaptations are where he does his best work.

Whichever it is, let the man work the way he wants to work. I’m here for it.

Gonna need you to take about 20% off the top there Dashie.

🤣

54 minutes until they actually start reviewing the show.

Up until then, the video can be boiled down to:

1. fans and pundits focusing on political alignments of sci-fi should STFU and focus on real shit, and
2. sci-fi creators should stop leaning on progressive idealism in lieu of good storytelling when justifying their existence.

Even more concisely: things are good or bad regardless of their political ideology.

I have quibbles with many their arguments, including the Rotten Tomatoes demonstration of progressive-leaning media having high critic ratings and low public ratings vs conservative-leaning media being flipped the other way. You make that case by pointing out examples of modern Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries that don’t completely suck, which they didn’t do.

That said, I’m not arguing that good Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries don’t exist. They absolutely might, and I’d like to see them if they do. But I also absolutely do not trust the ideologues to fairly or accurately measure quality in that way.

And that’s precisely the problem they’re pointing out with modern Star Wars and Trek. The creators seem to be getting high on their own progressive ideology and forgetting to focus on making great media first, which is SUPER annoying for people who don’t share those views.

I’m a lefty type, and I get it. I’d feel the same way if the genre I loved was flooded with hella conservative content and the creators were parading around its conservatism as a reason it’s so great.

DMs containing the identities of spies and assets.

He also managed to wriggle away from multiple rape charges in Sweden by waiting out the statute of limitations.

Heroes and villains alike have complex legacies.

The solution is clear.

You must construct additional pylons.

Everywhere; it’s a virtual conference.

⭕

Advocacy for a best-stunt-ensemble academy award sounds swell and all, but what’s to prevent that from leading to a stunts arms race that will simultaneously lead to more work and prestige in the field and absolutely lead to more people getting hurt?

A white people taco night no less…

The last season of Picard managed to turn things around. Yeah it was fan service, but it felt like tasteful fan service (mostly).

I think if he were to get top notch creature effects artists to do practical effects work on the alien world and save the CG stuff for wide shots and space stuff, I think people would respect that.

I started paying attention to this stuff back when Dolby Pro Logic was new, which was a pretty clever way to get surround effects using only left and right audio channels. Left and right channels went directly to the front left and right speakers, but it also compared wave forms coming from the left and right channels. Any wave forms that matched got sent to the center channel (like most on-screen dialog) and any that mismatched got sent to the rear surround speakers (noise, ambience, etc). It wasn’t perfect by any measure, but it was a pretty clever hack.

The fact that this news follows layoffs may not be a coincidence.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-lay-off-hundreds-azure-cloud-unit-business-insider-reports-2024-06-03/

This trailer is trash compared to the original one used for film’s initial release in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nW6LLojcUw

As a fellow person with partial Irish ancestry and a nickel allergy, do I have… magic powers?

Still not as dramatic as Jacek Stankiewicz’s wildlife photo, ‘Dispute’.

“I caught this scene while watching birds in the Bialowieza Forest. Young greenfinch was still fed by parents. However, from time to time birds looked like having argument. My friends interpret this scene in two ways. 1 A young naughty kid is arguing with a parent. 2. One kid is reporting to the parent that its brother did something wrong: look he has broken the glass in the window.”

I suspect this was a “do it or we’ll categorize Mozilla products as malicious software” situations. But some transparency from Mozilla would be nice.

Thin steel frame, no air bags, no crumple zones.

Check out the crash tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLcNwRi1Sk&t=40s

12 year SDE + 12 year TPM vet here.

Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.

Be transparent with the business’s goals and frustrations you are facing. There’s an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.

Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.

You can call out word misuse without necessarily stepping into “mansplaining” territory.