blivet

Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.

Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.

One reason might be that they couldn’t even be bothered to say what the moment they enjoyed was.

Yeah, I think it was Scorsese who said that he did “one for them, and one for me”.

I think it’s strange that it’s categorized as a comedy, though. It has some really funny moments, but on the whole I would call it a very intense drama.

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.

I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn’t be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.

to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door

Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.

I remember Damien Chazelle saying that they had considered an intermission for Babylon but that there was no natural break point in the story. Having seen it, I can state with perfect confidence that it does contain an appropriate point for an intermission at just the right time. I suspect that Chazelle just couldn’t bear the thought of the audience not watching his opus straight through.

I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8EKtLHTfDiM/XA3JXIv9naI/AAAAAAAAZDA/K_A17p8Uj_cvVI6xpwujsLvYXcbZ75HywCLcBGAs/s1600/Kong.jpg

An early production still.

They should go with Kubrick’s original idea of having the same actor portray Major Kong as well. Sellers hurt his leg toward the start of filming and claimed he couldn’t move around the B-52 interior set easily, but he was also having trouble with the character’s accent and was glad to bow out. He had an easier time with the president’s accent because he just imitated Kubrick himself.

Also, they’ve really doubled down on the interconnectivity. You used to be able to follow the main arc without difficulty if you saw most of the movies, but now you have to watch absolutely everything including the TV shows or you have no idea what’s going on.

Yeah, 10 or 15 years ago I read an article about how Google brings up new storage modules when they need to expand, and their modules are essentially shipping containers full of hard drives.

Yeah, I’m old enough to have grown up buying vinyl records. I want to buy a physical copy of the music I like.

The idea of depending on a streaming service to keep something available has always mades me uncomfortable, and given the recent removal of content from some of the studios’ services, it looks like my gut feeling was correct.

I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.

Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.

Life always finds a way.

Are you sure? Even if it’s true, I like the life forms we’ve got right now an awful lot, and they don’t deserve what we’re doing to them.

“The planet,” in terms of a rock orbiting the Sun, sure, but we are killing an awful lot of flora and fauna that would be doing fine if we weren’t around to fuck things up.

At my old job the director of my department had a poster up that said “move fast and break things”, but he also demanded 99.9999% uptime.