You may notice that luxury brands are making stuff by hand now. It's already painfully uncool to use AI images, regardless of how "real" they look – because they're cheap
303 karma · joined May 17, 2025
> Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of loved ones' friends and relatives to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other related services, such as availability of so-called "grief counselors", a title she claimed was unmerited. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry.
You can buy older versions for cheap but here's the expensive brand new set for reference: https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/products/graphics/solid-chi...
Not a pantone shill I just like color.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
The truth is the CDC and broader public-health apparatus were not starved of money; they performed badly despite substantial resources. The CDC botched its initial COVID test, their systems were antiquated, guidance was wildly inconsistent, and the agency later reorganized itself after acknowledging major operational failures.
So do its creators.
It should be ignored by savvy readers, and abolished from the writer's vocabulary.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
One need only look at the latest superhero reboot in which many true artists had their 'art' reduced to mere 'content'.
I disagree in the sense that reality includes the intangibles which machines cannot (today) reach, which is why any LLM-generated art is, for the most part, not art. It's images, it can be aesthetic or narrative or whatever – but I think it's fine to gatekeep art as an inherently human thing.
It may seem like that due to the media amplification effect – but it really isn't true!
- They dropped 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries were and found people were more likely to return them when they contained more money, showing honesty often beats the chance for easy gain. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712
- Longitudinal personality studies consistently show that conscientious people earn more money, build more savings, and achieve greater career success over their lifetimes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3498890/
- Multi-country research finds that societies w/higher levels of trust and honesty enjoy much higher GDP and stronger long-term economic growth. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
Don't let the algo get you down fellas: https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
1) Supply/demand. There's actually a shortage of quality movies relative to what the market will bear, one need only look at the occasional breakout hit like Obsession to see that it's possible to make a ton of money if you understand the demand signals.
2) Demand signals. Median age of someone with greenlight authority is ~62. In the 80s, there were 30-year-olds running entire studios. No disrespect to Boomers, but this business is about marketing cultural products and they have no idea about the culture. This also creates significant demographic headwinds in the job market.
3) Costs. Wages/COL are a part of it, as are unions, star power demand, and how companies like AAPL/AMZN can do streaming as a loss-leaders, which creates a lot of downward pressure. The biggest one is that in theatrical CAC > LTV. You can spend 2x your production budget on marketing and that investment evaporates the first week of showing – there's no real brand loyalty to studios/streamers, especially now that they've commoditized their IP and put it on rotation through the online platforms.
4) Originality. Franchises, sequels, and remakes were roughly three-quarters of 2025, and nine of top ten 2024 worldwide grossers were sequels. This is a result of local minima/risk arbitrage in the studio's portfolios, the bottom line is that people will still show up for a Spiderman movie even if its crappy b/c of the pre-aware IP and there's nothing better out there. There are wonderful exceptions to this of course, like Christopher Nolan and many indie films.
5) Politics. Hard to not deal with politics amidst the outrage cycle, but the easiest way to achieve that is to have a plurality of viewpoints – which you can get if you stop trying to bend beloved IP to contemporary politics and just make new shit!
https://www.freundevonfreunden.com/
It was so incredible to me at the time as a very young man, there was even fonts! I think it was Print Shop Deluxe for Windows 3.1/95.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Reminds me of old internet, when activists we doing it for The User.